After reviewing the case study, we consider the highlights of the Aufkie Music's current situation to be:

• There is no centralized system of records available for equipment data, work information, spare parts inventory records, purchasing information, and reference drawings.
• No clearly defined maintenance and maintenance and repair organization materials management performance goals or strategic directions have been spelled out by senior management.
• The maintenance organization does not focus on understanding then eliminating repetitive problems.
• The goals of the 2 maintenance engineers are unclear and as a result they may be underutilized.
• The stores organization has no records-keeping to support analysis of whether they have the right stock, too much inventory or not enough.
• No spare parts lists records are available to assist with identifying which stocked and non-stocked materials may be required to repair specific equipment.
• Much of the plant equipment was designed and built in-house and requires specialized technician skills and tools to maintain.
• The 2 plants do not share valuable information about their repetitive equipment problems, repair costs, spare parts inventory requirements, and contracts with common suppliers.
• It is assumed that both plants are located a significant distance away from major industrial centers, so spare parts delivery lead-times of 2-3 days are quite common.

Recommendations
Implementing the changes recommended by Peggy Banke may not be the most effective way to meet the company's objective to improve profits. A number of steps should be taken before the Maintenance organization decides on an appropriate course of action.

Aufkie Music first needs to establish a vision of how its maintenance organizations should be run to optimize the cost of maintenance while at the same time maximizing equipment uptime and equipment throughput.

Either by working with professional maintenance consultants or through a process of benchmarking other maintenance organizations that are achieving World Class results, Aufkie's maintenance managers need to define work processes and performance indicators that focus on achieving these goals.

The decisions made during this process equip management to decide whether or not to consider moving towards contracting the maintenance function(s) or instead focus on improving the effectiveness of its own maintenance organizations. Unlike the food and chemical industries with which Peggy Banke has experience, most plant equipment in the musical instrument industry is built in-house.

Repairing this equipment requires specially trained technicians using specialty tools. On this basis it would be unwise, and probably impractical to consider replacing the entire Aufkie maintenance force with outside maintenance contractors. Alternative strategies should be examined.

There are a number of maintenance management strategies that should be considered as viable alternatives to the contracting option. Deciding on the best strategy should be driven in large part by each alternative's potential to increase equipment uptime and throughput while controlling or reducing the manufacturing cost per unit. A four stage strategy would seem appropriate:

Stage 1. Improve tradesman productivity by introducing work planning and scheduling.

Stage 2. By applying reliability centered maintenance analysis techniques to the plants critical equipment, address repetitive equipment failures that can be solved using cost effective engineered solutions.

Stage 3. Identify appropriate preventive maintenance activities and predictive maintenance technologies that can be used to eliminate the repetitive equipment failures for which there are no cost effective engineered solutions.

Stage 4. Optimize the spare parts inventory then identify the costs and quantifiable benefits associated with maintaining plant storerooms. On the basis of this data, investigate the potential savings that could be achieved by having Aufkie supplier(s) manage the maintenance and repair inventory.

When searching for a replacement CMMS, Aufkie Music needs to ensure that they select a system that will adequately support their chosen business processes and be capable of measuring their chosen performance indicators. Since Aufkie management may choose to consider alternative maintenance management strategies in the future, the system they select must have the capability to adapt to changes in the organizations business processes. They also need to look for one system that meets the needs of both plants in order to take advantage of sharing information about repetitive equipment problems, repair costs, spare parts inventory requirements, and contracts with common suppliers. In essence, the system they select must be very agile and scaleable.

Since the Information Systems Manager has an understanding of object linking and embedding and object technology software, he may consider investigating an asset management solution - an object oriented solution. Through state of the art technology and workflow functionality, business process can be created and tailored easily to meet the organizations changing needs. By using object linking and embedding it is very easy to integrate the CMMS with the other plant systems. It is also very easy to attach drawings, notes, material safety data sheet information, and so forth, to equipment records, work order records, and other appropriate records.

Once a replacement CMMS has been selected, a proper implementation plan should be developed with the software supplier to ensure that the system is implemented as quickly and cost effectively as possible. Peggy Banke should be an active participant in CMMS selection and implementation processes.

After the functional CMMS has been implemented and the initial Aufkie maintenance and materials management business process changes have been made, the organization will be equipped properly to monitor maintenance costs, equipment downtime statistics, and manufacturing capacity. The need to adjust or consider alternative maintenance strategies and tactics can then be addressed in a meaningful way.