Case Study: Maintenance Management Strategy and Engineering Efficiency of an UK Organization
The report is prepared to discuss about the maintenance of management strategies and its positive impact on the organization’s success. While, attending a conference regarding the maintenance management strategy, I have come to come to know about its importance and here I will choose a proposed case study for an organization in United Kingdom and develop strategies to support the growth, development and success of the organization. From the case study, it can be understood that the maintenance management strategy and engineering efficiency are not satisfactory though it has been good in terms of managing an effective workforce at Herbert Parkinson, United Kingdom (Herbertparkinson.co.uk 2018). To manage effectiveness of the maintenance strategies and ensuring steady business growth and success, it is important to follow certain steps for implementing the recommendations that have arisen from the Reliability Centered Maintenance, Total Productive Maintenance and Business Centered Maintenance strategies.
The maintenance strategy enables cost driving necessity rather than the competitive resources during the management of manufacturing and production processes. The maintenance strategies could reduce the cost of manufacturing and production and at the same time, focus on enhancing the production and increase competitiveness by managing process availability and improving the quality of products and services too. The maintenance strategy will establish good interaction between the production and quality by assessing the maintenance point of view. It can be understood that the production output is he actual product expected while the secondary output is the demand for maintenance strategies, which is also considered as an input for the maintenance functions. Thus, all these aspects are interrelated and it is clear that by enabling a strong maintenance strategy, the equipments and machineries will be managed properly and the costs and equipment processes’ variation will be reduced.
Reliability Centered Maintenance
The maintenance management strategy and engineering is considerably weak for the weaving industry and soft furbishing industry in United Kingdom. The company managed contacts with sewing machine specialists to ensure that proper services could be provided to the curtain section for enhancing the efficiency of the weaving company at a much faster pace. There were various issues regarding the lack of a proper asset management system, breakdown of information and not selecting the right maintenance strategy. There was need to adopt a right maintenance strategy not only for overcoming these issues, but also to enhance the market share within the competitive business environment. Due to this, it is important to adopt the new and novel maintenance management techniques for ensuring that the significant measurable benefits are obtained and the available technologies are used properly too (Campbell and Reyes-Picknell 2015). Though the organization named Herbert Parkinson Ltd possessed a planned and effective workforce, still there was lack of a proper maintenance programme, still it rarely met the targets because of the problems of unexpected breakdowns. Another problem faced by the company could be the lack of ability to record the intellectual capital of the workforce.
The Significance of a Reliable Maintenance Management Strategy
Total Productive Maintenance
The TPM process is supported including the Autonomous and planned maintenance for strengthening the maintenance management system and facilitates continuous improvement all throughout. It would allow Herbert Parkinson Ltd to gain a clear understanding of the maintenance program and at the same time identify the business goals and objectives with much ease and effectiveness. It would also arouse interest among the workers and managers of to make decisions at all levels of the organization to respond to changes and furthermore bring manufacturing and production excellence (Jasiulewicz-Kaczmarek 2013). From the case study, it could be understood that the company was facing several issues due to the absence of an effective maintenance strategy because of which, it was unable to gain competitive advantage. Due to this, the company wanted to enable changes for bringing innovation and introducing the new products and services for fulfilling the needs and requirements of the customers with convenience.
By adopting the TPM approach, the company could identify the things that were missing and manage reliability thinking to understand the feasibility of the system along with the approaches that had been undertaken to maintain the organizational assets and for ensuring business success. The company was also facing issues related to the maintenance maturity that was required for obtaining the most accurate data and information (Stamboliska, Rusi?ski and Moczko 2015). It could get difficult to check whether everyone would be at equivalent levels or not and to overcome the problems associated with the irregularity of the assets and maintenance maturity, the SRCM was considered as effective sometimes for the reviewing and maintenance of the management strategies at Herbert Parkinson Ltd, United Kingdom.
Herbert Parkinson Ltd could implement the Business Centered Maintenance strategies for reversing the sales decline and overcome the problems related to lesser profit and inability to gain competitive advantage. The business centered maintenance approaches could overcome the issues like higher costs of operations, lack of value and non-exploitation of scopes and opportunities that were required for obtaining a competitive edge over its competitors (Jardine and Tsang 2013). Other issues experienced during the maintenance included lack of treatability at board levels and management levels, inappropriate culture, which resulted in ineffective budget, unforced reports and lack of a proper business plan. The leaders and maintenance supervision lacked management skills, the planned maintenance suffered from low level, and thus immediate maintenance management strategies should be implemented (Yssaad, Khiat and Chaker 2014). Though the company boosted of a dedicated workforce, still the company suffered due to the management of a proper maintenance strategy, so the business centered management strategies could be beneficial as well for supporting choices and make the business successful too.
Total Productive Maintenance: Facilitating Continuous Improvement and Supporting Business Goals
I have adopted the Reliability Centered Maintenance or RCM strategy because of its reliability and efficiency in managing the production process with much lesser operational cost, though bringing out the best quality products and services at the same time. The reasons for choosing this kind of strategy could be the efficiency that would be brought by following all these steps illustrated below.
The various steps that could be followed for RCM included:
- Selection of the equipment or machinery within the facility and then prepare it for the reliability centered maintenance analysis. It could be reviewed in terms of its impact on the operations, previous costs of repair and previous costs associated with the preventive maintenance (Rastegari and Mobin 2016). This would improve the efficiency of weaving process as well as enhance the production and quality of products and services.
- Defining the boundaries or limitations and even the system’s functions is important as well. One such example could be the conveyor belt that could be used for transporting the goods where the inputs are mechanical energy and the output is the goods produced.
- Identify the probability of failures and checking of feasibility is another important step that shall be followed.
- The root causes of the failure models should be identified and few examples could be lack of lubrication in the equipments, loosened belts, etc., which could hinder the successful accomplishment o production goals and objectives (Eden and Ackermann 2013).
- The probable impacts of failures are identified and resolution methods such as Fault Tree analysis, Risk based inspection, etc.
- Selection of a maintenance procedure for each of the modes of failures is the next step.
- Implementing and reviewing the performance and reliability of the maintenance management technique is important to check any changes and improvements that can be done (Punt et al. 2016).
The RCM maintenance strategy could also define the needs and requirements at Herbert Parkinson Ltd and put efforts to manage the critical and non-critical equipments, functions and systems required for enhancing the efficiency of production process. This would result in focused improvement on every function and systems at various levels and at the same time, provide training and educational opportunities to the individuals to improve their skills and knowledge regarding production value. There would be planned maintenance, the autonomous processes could be managed with ease, and effectiveness too, furthermore might reduce the costs of production without compromising on the quality and production value to the utmost level possible.
The current maintenance strategy at the organization could be to manage the weaving functions at various stages of the product life cycle and thus is stated as run-to-failure. It would reduce the supplier time to provide raw materials and resources and would even allow the organization to manage maintenance contract with the sewing machine specialists to manage the curtain division as well. This would decrease the waiting time for replacing or fixing any equipments that might not be functional. The asset management system could also help in maintaining records, furthermore ensure proper checking of the strategies and functions used by the company to increase the business operations’ effectiveness.
The Reliability centered maintenance or RCM could be an effective corporate level maintenance strategy implemented at Herbert Parkinson Ltd for optimizing the performance of the maintenance program as well as implement those on the various assets of the organization. This effective method could also enable the maintenance strategies to be optimized, furthermore maintain consistent productivity as well as ensure cost effectiveness while implementing the maintenance management strategies. The four major principles of this kind of maintenance program or strategy adopted at Herbert Parkinson Ltd could be to preserve the functions of the system, identify the issues that could affect the functioning of the system and prioritize on the modes of failure (Campbell, Jardine and McGlynn 2016). The focus would be on improving the system performance and availability along with the identification of various maintenance practices for ensuring proper availability of the equipments to keep the products and services safe and healthy that should be delivered to the customers.
By maintaining the maintenance strategies, it would be easy for Herbert Parkinson Ltd for managing the safety of workers within the organization as well as facilitate the production process to deliver the best quality output and maintain excellence in terms of quality. As a consultant, it is my responsibility to select the most appropriate maintenance management strategy and enhance the operational reliability too. It could also improve the level of safety of the workers and minimize the cost of production and operations largely. Due to machine break downs, the interruptions could frequently occur, which would not only degrade the performance but might even cost the production level largely. The down time means the duration during which the machines and equipments during the production may be unable to function properly (Yssaad and Abene 2015). With the proper selection of maintenance management strategies, the down time would decrease and the faults would be rectified quite easily too. The down time could be calculated by finding the sum of repair and waiting time.
Reliability Centered Maintenance: Optimizing Performance and Enhancing Efficiency
The maintenance management measures include direct preventive maintenance activities to make sure that the equipments, machineries are cleaned, lubricated, and the wear and tear parts are replaced as well to ensure consistent weaving process and enhanced productivity. The monitoring of conditions would also be useful in observing the various faults and detect the actual failure before it affects the entire production process. The monitoring of conditions consistently should also identify the observable characteristics quite easily and determine the measurable parameters too associated with the plants and machineries (Dehghanian et al. 2013). The indirect preventive maintenance should assist in the undertaking of corrective actions to report any failures or changes in parameters that were experienced.
The Lean Sigma is an important concept of maintenance management that streamlines the business processes and checks whether the processes are in place or not. By applying the Lean Six Sigma, it would be easy for Herbert Parkinson Ltd to carry out a systematic approach for reducing the wastes and deliver value through the production of best quality products and ensuring customer satisfaction too. This methodology could reduce the process cycle time, eliminate the chances of faulty generations, reduce the inventory level problems, enable optimization of resources and finally improve the delivery time of the products and services (Chemweno et al. 2015). The sewing machines and equipments would function properly as well as the out or order instruments could be reduced as well. The partnership strategy could be beneficial for the organization, because it would allow the other business organization to provide supplies and introduce a new range of furbishing fabrics to remain competitive within the business environment. There would be business expansion along with production of fabric woven items in higher quantity and excellence in terms of quality too (Herbertparkinson.co.uk 2018).
I attended the conference on the maintenance management strategy and found that all these strategies are effective, though the Total Productive Maintenance is the most effective. Because of the lack of overall equipments’ efficiency, it is important to make sure that the machineries and equipments are managed properly to ensure better productivity and further more result in customer satisfaction too. The TPM would help to determine the feasibility of the assets and furthermore clarify the issues associated with the maintenance maturity. The right quality data and information are obtained, which further helps in managing the organizational assets properly and ensure proper maintenance (Cucoranu, Parwani and Pantanowitz 2014). The reliability centered maintenance or RCM is considered by me as effective as well due to its reduced costs of repairing and preventive maintenance measures.
Business Centered Maintenance: Reversing Sales Decline and Gaining Competitive Edge
The Reliability centered maintenance and Total Productive Maintenance; both are effective philosophies for changing the culture within the organization as well as establish processes for continuous development and improvements. The RCM focuses mainly on the maintenance strategy whereas the TPM mainly is based on the people and processes managed within the organization to transform the entire culture and identify the assets that are responsible for ensuring successful business functioning of Herbert Parkinson Ltd . These two approaches could bring maintenance excellence as well as reduce the chances of errors, increase the productivity of the organization and decrease the down time and costs of operations largely (Herbertparkinson.co.uk 2018).
Conclusion
The industrial areas of Herbert Parkinson Ltd where the processes of manufacturing and production were usually managed should be monitored to accomplish the objective of maintenance, i.e., to enhance the performance and operational potential, furthermore improve the level of personnel at minimum cost. Failures could emerge due to the natural wear and tear as well as due to the improper handling of instruments by staffs due to lack of knowledge, skills and expertise. After participating in the conference, I managed to analyze the different maintenance management strategies and finally found that both the RCM and TPM had been quite effective for managing the organizational assets including the machineries and equipments. It not only helped in ensuring successful business functioning but also reduced the costs of operations, furthermore maintained reliability in terms of the maintenance management measures and enhanced business productivity.
References
Campbell, J.D. and Reyes-Picknell, J.V., 2015. Uptime: Strategies for excellence in maintenance management. CRC Press.
Campbell, J.D., Jardine, A.K. and McGlynn, J. eds., 2016. Asset management excellence: optimizing equipment life-cycle decisions. CRC Press.
Chemweno, P., Pintelon, L., Van Horenbeek, A. and Muchiri, P., 2015. Development of a risk assessment selection methodology for asset maintenance decision making: An analytic network process (ANP) approach. International Journal of Production Economics, 170, pp.663-676.
Cucoranu, I.C., Parwani, A.V. and Pantanowitz, L., 2014. Lean Six Sigma. In Practical Informatics for Cytopathology (pp. 113-119). Springer, New York, NY.
Dehghanian, P., Fotuhi-Firuzabad, M., Aminifar, F. and Billinton, R., 2013. A comprehensive scheme for reliability centered maintenance in power distribution systems—Part I: Methodology. IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, 28(2), pp.761-770.
Eden, C. and Ackermann, F., 2013. Making strategy: The journey of strategic management. Sage.
Herbertparkinson.co.uk. (2018). Herbert Parkinson | Customised Soft Furnishings – Outstanding delivery and service. [online] Available at: https://www.herbertparkinson.co.uk/ [Accessed 17 Apr. 2018].
Jardine, A.K. and Tsang, A.H., 2013. Maintenance, replacement, and reliability: theory and applications. CRC press.
Jasiulewicz-Kaczmarek, M., 2013. Sustainability: orientation in maintenance management—theoretical background. In EcoProduction and Logistics (pp. 117-134). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Punt, A.E., Butterworth, D.S., Moor, C.L., De Oliveira, J.A. and Haddon, M., 2016. Management strategy evaluation: best practices. Fish and Fisheries, 17(2), pp.303-334.
Rastegari, A. and Mobin, M., 2016, January. Maintenance decision making, supported by computerized maintenance management system. In Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS), 2016 Annual (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
Yssaad, B., Khiat, M. and Chaker, A., 2014. Reliability centered maintenance optimization for power distribution systems. International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems, 55, pp.108-115.
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