The Graphical Analysis for Maintenance Management Method: A Quantitative Graphical Analysis to Support Maintenance Management Decision Making

This article proposes a logical support tool for maintenance management decision making. This tool is called the Graphical Analysis for Maintenance Management (GAMM), a method to visualize and analyze equipment dependability data in a graphical form. The method helps for a quick and clear analysis and interpretation of equipment maintenance (corrective and preventive) and operational stoppages. Then, opportunities can be identified to improve both operations and maintenance management (short–medium term) and potential investments (medium–long term). The method allows an easy visualization of parameters, such as the number of corrective actions between preventive maintenance, the accumulation of failures in short periods of time, and the duration of maintenance activities and sequence of stops of short duration. In addition, this tool allows identifying, a priori, anomalous behavior of equipment, whether derived from its own function, maintenance activities, misuse, or even equipment designs errors. In this method, we used a nonparametric estimator of the reliability function as a basis for the analysis. This estimator takes into account equipment historical data (total or partial) and can provide valuable insights to the analyst even with few available data. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.