Maintenance staffing management

This paper addresses the maintenance staffing planning process and the role simulation plays in this process. Feedback control notion is utilized in this personnel planning problem. The research investigates the tradeoffs between maintenance personnel staffing levels and the throughput of a production line. The more reactive maintenance (RM) personnel on staff, the lower the probability that a given repair will be delayed waiting for an available personnel. On the other hand, increasing the number of personnel increases labor costs while reducing the utilization of RM labor resources. What makes this tradeoff complicated is that the magnitude of the impact of reactive maintenance delays varies considerably between bottleneck and non-bottleneck stations. The tradeoff is examined, factoring in both labor costs and the cost of lost throughput. An approach is developed for determining RM staffing levels that minimize overall costs.