CURRENT RESEARCH ACTIVITY ON THE IMPACT OF NO FAULT FOUND (NFF) ON MAINTENANCE EFFECTIVENESS THROUGH LIFE

摘要

Maintenance Effectiveness and Efficiency need to be one hundred percent if service and availability are to be delivered to customer's expectations. However, the occurrence of faults where the cause cannot be determined, usually described in the UK as No Fault Found (NFF) and in USA as Retest OK (RTOK) can often be a huge and disruptive pressure on the successful delivery of support to the customer. The NFF problem affects many industries and often in different ways, yet good lessons are often not being shared. What is clearly not in doubt is that huge sums of money are still being wasted by not sharing best practice and not understanding the true cost of the problem. This paper will provide a summary of the NFF problem and explain the common causes; it will describe the impact and some of the solutions identified in the project underway at the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Through-life Engineering Services at Cranfield University to research the problem across different industries.