Maintenance, repair and operations

Maintenance, repair and operations or maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) is fixing any sort of mechanical or electrical device should it become out of order or broken (repair) as well as performing the routine actions which keep the device in working order (maintenance) or prevent trouble from arising (preventive maintenance).

All actions which have the objective of retaining or restoring an item in or to a state in which it can perform its required function. The actions include the combination of all technical and corresponding administrative, managerial, and supervision actions.

Engineering

In telecommunication, and engineering in general, the term maintenance has the following meanings:

1. Any activity – such as tests, measurements, replacements, adjustments and repairs — intended to retain or restore a functional unit in or to a specified state in which the unit can perform its required functions.

2. For material — all action taken to retain material in a serviceable condition or to restore it to serviceability. It includes inspection, testing, servicing, classification as to serviceability, repair, rebuilding, and reclamation.

3. For material — all supply and repair action taken to keep a force in condition to carry out its mission.

4. For material — the routine recurring work required to keep a facility (plant, building, structure, ground facility, utility system, or other real property) in such condition that it may be continuously used, at its original or designed capacity and efficiency for its intended purpose.

Manufacturers and Industrial Supply Companies often refer to MRO as opposed to Original Equipment Manufacture (OEM). OEM includes any activity related to the direct manufacture of goods, where MRO refers to any maintenance and repair activity to keep a manufacturing plant running.

Industrial supply companies can generally be sorted into two types:

the ones who cater to the MRO market generally carry a broad range of items such as fasteners, conveyors, cleaning goods, plumbing, and tools to keep a plant running.
OEM supply companies generally provide a smaller range of goods in much larger quantities with much lower prices, selling materials that will be regularly consumed in the manufacturing process to create the finished item.

MRO software

In many organizations because of the number of devices or products that need to be maintained or the complexity of systems, there is a need to manage the information with software packages. This is particularly the case in aerospace (e.g. airline fleets), military installations, large plants (e.g. manufacturing, power generation, petrochemical) and ships.

These software tools help engineers and technicians in increasing the availability of systems and reducing costs and repair times as well as reducing material supply time and increasing material availability by improving supply chain communication.

As MRO involves working with an organization’s products, resources, suppliers and customers, MRO packages have to interface with many enterprise business software systems (PLM,EAM, ERP, SCM, CRM).

One of the functions of such software is the configuration of bills of materials or BOMs, taking the component parts list from engineering (eBOM) and manufacturing (mBOM) and updating it from “as delivered” through “as maintained” to “as used”.

Another function is project planning logistics, for example identifying the critical path on the list of tasks to be carried out (inspection, diagnosis, locate/order parts and service) to calculate turnaround times (TAT).

Other tasks that software can perform:

Planning operations,
Managing execution of events,
Management of assets (parts, tools and equipment inventories),
Knowledge-base data on:

Maintenance service history,
Serial numbered parts,
Reliability data: MTBF (mean time between failures), MTTB (mean time to breakdown), MTBR (mean time between removals),
Maintenance and repair documentation and best practices,
Warranty/guarantee documents.

Many of these tasks are addressed in Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS). Data standards have been developed around these activities, most notably EAMXML