TQM and BPR: lessons for maintenance management

Competitive pressures on manufacturing organisations have obliged them to l ook at all improvement possibilities. Among the most popular and well-docum ented change interventions have been total quality management (TQM) and bus iness process reengineering (BPR). As the management of physical assets now accounts for a rapidly increasing share of operational costs, greater atte ntion is being directed to maintenance thinking. Two maintenance interventi ons - reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) and total productive maintenanc e (TPM) - have seen significant industrial application over the last decade . It is the purpose of this paper to apply the general approach of Meredith in an earlier paper to analyse the implementation of these with reference to the TQM, BPR and other change intervention literature and to assess the extent to which the maintenance implementation follows the path of other in terventions. Four postulates relating to the implementation of new maintena nce systems an analysed: the significance of a prescriptive methodology, qu antification of objectives, managerial attitudes, and the importance of not appending maintenance initiatives to existing operations practices. This w ill facilitate a critical assessment of the potential for and implications of RCM and TPM intervention and thus contribute to the development of the m aintenance management field. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights rese rved.