Improving apparel productivity through in-house programme

The greatest benefit of computerised maintenance management control system (CMMCS) is the elimination of paperwork and manual tracking activities, thus enabling the building staff to become more productive, feels Maged Kamal.

In the recently released European Standards regarding maintenance, maintenance is defined as the combination of all technical, administrative and managerial actions during the life cycle of an item intended to retain it in, or restore it to, a state in which it can perform the required function. In the same standards, maintenance management (MM) is defined as all the activities of the management that determine the maintenance objectives, strategies, and responsibilities and implement them by means such as maintenance planning, maintenance control and supervision, and several improving the methods including economical aspects in the organisation.

This definition of MM is very aligned to other such notions found in modern maintenance literature such as Campbell and Jardine, Campbell, or Shenoy and Bhadury. Still other definitions consider MM as the management of all assets owned by a company, based on maximising the return on investment in the asset.

Wireman says that MM would include, but would not be limited to, the following: preventive maintenance (PM), inventory and procurement, work order system, computerised maintenance management control systems (CMMCS), technical and interpersonal training, operational involvement, proactive maintenance, reliability centered maintenance (RCM), total productive maintenance (TPM), statistical financial optimisation, and continuous improvement. Each of these initiatives is a building block of MM process.

Another approach to MM definition is offered by Duffuaa et al. They indicate how a maintenance system can be seen as a simple input output system. The inputs are the manpower, management, tools, equipment, etc., and the output is the equipment working reliably and well configured to reach the planned plant operation.

The purpose of this paper is to present a simple low cost computerised maintenance management control system for apparel industry; the main focus would be about the implementation of this developed system mainly in the sewing room.

Apparel enterprises use different equipments such as sewing machines, spreading machines, cutting machines, pressing machines, etc. The failure of these machines can cause serious social and economic consequences. However, maintenance activities on these machines are often neglected, either for short-term cost savings from lower maintenance activities or due to lack of awareness on importance of maintenance by top management.

All these maintenance actions resulted additional cost. Therefore, maintenance must be done so as to achieve the objectives of the organisation, making a rational between corrective and preventive maintenance. The enterprise under consideration (ETC) is engaged in apparel export. The enterprise has more than 20 years of experience in garment production.

Objectives
The main objective of this paper is to analyse the current manual maintenance management control system of a medium size apparel company (ETC) and to recommend improved simple cost effective computerised maintenance management control system using a simplified Microsoft programme such as excel sheets.

Features of computer-based maintenance management system
While it is possible to operate a sound maintenance management control programme without a computerised database system, most operations find that a computer-based system is inexpensive and highly effective toward achieving optimum results. Care would be taken to ensure that the new designed system provides the features needed in the apparel industry. It is found that the following features are an integral part of any computer-ba