Risk Resillience Concepts Operations Process Management Examine

¶ … Risk Resillience" concepts Operations Process Management examine statement: Preventive maintenance viewed process maintaining "health" a machine. Using health care analogy, explain differences tradeoffs breakdown maintenance, preventive maintenance total productive maintenance, detailed case study required apply theory model concept.

Operations management

The importance of preventive maintenance

The emergent challenges facing economic agents have created a context in which the machineries and the equipments are no longer perceived as the primary source of income, nor as the operational focus of the economic agents. Today, entrepreneurs strive to attain their organizational goals through the satisfaction of the customer needs, through the motivation of the employees, through the pleasing of the community or through the creation of value for the shareowners.

In such a context, the emphasis placed on the purchase, replacement and functioning of the organizational machineries has decreased. But much like a paradox, despite the decreased investments in machineries, the company and stakeholder expectations from the equipments have increased. This translates into an outcome in which economic agents strive to preserve the good functioning of the machineries and to utilize them in a highly efficient and effective manner. In order to attain this objective, intense attention is to be placed on preventive maintenance.

The concept of preventive maintenance -- and the degree to which it is applied -- is derived from the greater theory of risk resilience. It argues that an economic agent's strategic decisions are based on the recognition of risk and the diverse degrees to which it accepts the risks. Risks are present at all levels of business operations and their mitigation is pegged to various organizational attitudes and beliefs, but also diverse resource capabilities.

"A business resilience approach recognizes the value of taking a holistic or integrated approach to risk management, compliance, security, emergency and crisis management, business continuity and disaster recovery. […] Risk forms the foundation on which all business resilience strategies, priorities and plans are developed. The risk layer is based on enterprise risk management practices and tools that start with establishing the resilience risk appetite of the executive through to risk monitoring and controls" (Janellis Business Consulting Services).

An important risk with economic agents is that of the machineries and equipments breaking down. In case such a scenario materializes, the company would encounter additional expenditures, sometimes unexpected, but which generically imply that financial resources have to be removed from investment projects and redirected to repair the machineries.

In the mitigation of the risks encountered at the level of machineries and equipments, economic agents implement the concept and application of preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance of organizational equipments is similar to preventive healthcare and based on the principle that it is easier to prevent a disease than it is to cure the same disease. But aside from this similarity at the bottom of the concepts, healthcare prevention and maintenance prevention differ in terms of numerous aspects, such as the subjects they target -- people in one case as opposed to machineries in the other case, the importance of the processes -- national in the case of healthcare prevention and company related in the case of maintenance prevention --, resources involved in the mitigation of the risks and so on.

Preventive management is specifically represented by a breakdown of the operational activities and the identification of various steps and equipments used in the completion of organizational tasks. Additionally, it sees that the operations of preventive management are broken down into specific stages at which all equipments and their functions are controlled. The scope of this breakdown and control is that of identifying any functional errors and remedying them before more severe damages are created.

"Preventive maintenance is a schedule of planned maintenance actions aimed at the prevention of breakdowns and failures. The primary goal of preventive maintenance is to prevent the failure of equipment before it actually occurs. It is designed to preserve and enhance equipment reliability by replacing worn components before they actually fail. Preventive maintenance activities include equipment checks, partial or complete overhauls at specified periods, oil changes, lubrication and so on" (Reliability Engineering Resources).

The scope of preventive management is that of identifying and replacing equipment components before they break down and disrupt the organizational functions and processes. The disadvantages of such an action are pegged to increased operational complexities and sometimes tedious processes, as verifications have to be periodically conducted. But in spite of these limitations, preventive management reveals important tradeoffs, materialized in the following:

Increased reliability of the organizational system and equipments

Reduced expenditures with the replacement of the equipments

Reduction in the system downtime

Higher quality of the inventory management of the spare parts (Janellis Business Consulting Services).

Preventive maintenance is not an isolated business strategy and action, but it is an ongoing business model, integrated in the very core of the economic agent. Or it should be so in order to create the above mentioned tradeoffs. A theoretical model into which preventive maintenance was integrated is that of total productive management, which represents an incorporated approach to organizational operations. Total preventive management is based on the concepts of total quality management, executive commitment, employee empowerment and long-term application of the processes. And total preventive management reveals the importance of preventive management.

"TPM brings maintenance into focus as a necessary and vitally important part of the business. It is no longer regarded as a non-profit activity. Down time for maintenance is scheduled as a part of the manufacturing day and, in some cases, as an integral part of the manufacturing process. It is no longer simply squeezed in whenever there is a break in material flow. The goal is to hold emergency and unscheduled maintenance to a minimum" (Roberts, 1997).

At a theoretical stance, total productive management appeared as a complex and challenging model of conducting business operations. But numerous economic agents have implemented it and found it worthwhile. Aerospace industry supplier MRC Bearing implemented TPM by cleaning the machines, creating functionality standards for the machines, collecting and processing downtime data, creating teams specialized in equipment improvement and created TPM coordinators (Maintenance Resources, 1999). And, like the rest of the companies which implemented total preventive management, it enjoyed the tradeoffs.