MAINTENANCE IN SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURING

Background: Sustainable development is about reaching a balance between economic, social, and environmental goals, as well as people's participation in the planning process in order to gain their input and support. For a company, sustainable development means adoption of such business strategy and actions that contribute to satisfying present needs of company and stakeholders, as well as simultaneous protection, maintenance and strengthening of human and environmental potential which will be needed in the future. This new approach forces manufacturing companies to change their previous management paradigms. New management paradigm should include new issues and develop innovative methods, practices and technologies striving for solving problem of shortages of resources, softening environment overload and enabling development of environment-friendly lifecycle of products. Hence, its realization requires updating existing production models as they are based on previously accepted paradigm of unlimited resources and unlimited regeneration capabilities. Maintenance plays a crucial role because of its impact on availability, reliability, quality and life cycle cost, thus it should be one of the main pillars of new business running model. 

Material and methods: The following paper is a result of research on the literature and observation of practices undertaken by a company within maintenance area.

Results and conclusions: The main message is that considering sustainable manufacturing requires considerable expanding range of analysis and focusing on supporting processes. Maintenance offers numerous opportunities of decreasing influence of business processes on natural environment and more efficient resources utilization. The goal of maintenance processes realizing sustainable development strategy is increased profitability of exploitation and optimization of total lifecycle cost without disturbing safety and environmental issues.