THE CONCEPT OF RELIABILITY CENTERED MAINTENANCE(RCM) AND TOTAL PRODUCTIVE MAINTENANCE(TPM) (MANAGEMENT PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
Chapter One: Introduction
1.1 Introduction
For the companies, planning, managing, scheduling, controlling, monitoring, and implementing the tasks etc is critical role for them to ensure the development, it is dispensable for the company to achieve their goals. However, the most fundamental approach to carry out these tasks is almost depends on their equipment; without proper maintenance, the task performed may face delay and even stoppage. Major companies dislike their equipment suddenly shutdown or malfunction which cannot add any value for their product, as it causes wastes; which is not only sabotage their quality but also cause safety issues, and even worst such as drop their reputation in global market. In highly competitive market, major companies prefer their upstream and downstream work efficiency to support entire supply chain in order to gain more profits. Thus, for the company that works with other company, or acts as an upstream or downstream role, these equipments breakdown will impact not only own profitability, and even affect other companies (ripple effect in supply chain), which is then creates an extensive losses. Therefore, for the company that intends to gain long-term benefits, maintenance should also be considered as their profit strategy. Maintenance carried out should not be careless, it should be carried out at the proper interval, with the right method, lowest cost, and effectiveness to reduce the expense, for the goal of company is relevant with profit. In traditional companies, people only carried out maintenance when it breakdown, and does not consider the actually potential performance in their equipment (e.g. machine operates with low performance), which entailed that they not fully utilized their equipment. Wang and Lee (2001) stated that many systems often operate at less than full capacity which led to low in productivity and high in producing cost. Thus, maintenance not only for the equipment continually operate for a period but also needed to perform as intended. Effective maintenance is important to ensure the equipment has optimum operation, extends the equipment life, and increases its reliability, availability, safety, and cost- effectiveness.
Maintenance strategies have developed and improved in century. From reactive to proactive approaches have shown the important of maintenance as a business strategy and shown the people (but not all) realized how significant the maintenance is. Basically, the maintenance policy is refers to corrective, preventive, and predictive maintenance. Although these maintenance policies can reduce the failure and restore the system in operating condition, deteriorations and breakdowns still occur (Eti et al, 2006). Each maintenance strategy has its own strength and weakness, implementing one maintenance policy cannot fully adapt to entire system. This are then bring the evolution of maintenance policy, and developed to the more advance maintenance strategy. Nowadays, the two advance maintenance strategies that have been applied widely are Reliability-centered Maintenance (RCM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). These two approaches have shown its advantages and how is it enhance the competitive edge of company to compete with others. However, they are still more than half of companies still not attract with the maintenance and adopted traditional maintenance approach such as run-to-break (RTB) as their maintenance strategies and it have found that most of the reasons is due to lacking of knowledge about maintenance strategies, resist to change, financial difficulties, employee skill, communication, quality, and etc (Ahuja and Khamba, 2008; Baglee and Knowles, 2010). Thus, in this study, two advance strategies, RCM and TPM are focused and used to establish new maintenance strategy.
