published_or_final_version / Business Administration / Master / Master of Business Administration

Thesis (M.S. in Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2009. / Thesis Advisor(s): McMasters, Alan W. ; Moore, Thomas P. "June 1990." Description based on title screen as viewed on October 19, 2009. DTIC Indicator(s): Test equipment, Automatic, Problem solving, Logistics support, Aircraft maintenance, Naval aircraft, Theses. Author(s) subject terms: Automatic Test Equipment, ATE, Consolidated Automated Support System, CASS, avionics testing. Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-115). Also available online.

The purpose of this paper is to present a maintenance study focused on total productive maintenance (TPM) and reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). Its approach is based on the first pillars of TPM, preventive and autonomous maintenance, as well as the FMEA analysis of RCM for maintenance analysis, which was conducted in this study. The implementation of TPM was successful in that various preventive maintenance (PM) policies assigned to the assets were implemented and it was demonstrated that TPM application in the construction industry could reduce the excessive accumulation of maintenance with the same effective optimization, and with support from RCM analysis and its heavy equipment systems analysis. Excessive corrective maintenance accounts for high investment and delay rates in work times of the assigned project. Traditional methods of availability guarantee, such as reactive or routine maintenance, are insufficient to satisfy a heavy equipment maintenance plan; therefore, what is called for is the systematic application of RCM and TMP because they allow the selection and application of effective PM tasks. An approach that develops and thoroughly analyzes the strategies of continuous corrective and PM is used with an atmosphere of uncertainty and with operational data limited by criticism. Results show a 90% improvement in availability. / Revisión por pares

The lack of smart resources management and servicescape strategies within the social housing sector in the late 1970s influenced the rise of successive Governments to consider the restructuring of the traditional ‘cumbersome’ Local Authority based structures and approaches toward more ‘enterprise focussed’ management organisations (Sharp & Jones 2012). This change in central Government policy encouraged Local Authorities to assign through outsourcing their housing stock (including associated asset management services) as part of a Large Scale Voluntary Transfer (LSVT) via a process of compulsory competitive tendering to Housing Associations and/or set up Housing Trusts to increase the accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness of social housing and healthcare provision in the local community. As part of this modernisation process, all social housing and community care providers (also known as ‘Registered Social Landlords’ - RSLs) became subject to statutory audits, inspections and regulation, and performance management, to ensure the service quality delivery requirements. More recently, however, changes in the legislative framework have introduced choice-based letting policy, putting the customer first, service delivery and additionally RSLs are required to act as ‘Corporate Social Landlords’. These changes have focused RSLs attention on the need to sharpen service responsiveness, especially in the area of housing maintenance management (DETR 2000). Previous research (Holmes 1985; Spedding 1990; Johnston 1993; Stewart & Stoker 1995; Olubodun 1996, 2000, 2001; Sagoo et al. 1996; El-Haram & Horner 2002; Kangwa & Olubodun 2003, 2005; Boussabaine & Kirkham 2004; Jones & Cooper 2007; Prowle 2009; Babangida et al. 2012) has mainly concentrated on analysing maintenance management factors at the micro level; developing maintenance models and framework design for operational level. However, in the social housing sector, there have been no studies undertaken to date that have been focused on housing maintenance strategies – for example, how this is formulated, the key drivers of change and the impact on customer orientated service delivery. The purpose of this study is to identify the critical factors that drive the decision-making process in order to formulate responsive housing maintenance strategies and to develop a decision support model to improve customer service delivery of social housing provision. Research methodology Through a process of qualitative case study, pilot questionnaire surveys, workshops and qualitative in-depth interviews, the research has identified how the housing maintenance strategies are formulated and how social housing providers could enhance customer service delivery. The study comprised four phases in order to reflect the key objectives of the research. The first phase comprised a review of literature on social housing provision in the UK, identifying relevant changes in the legislative framework, an assessment of the challenges faced by RSLs and the key factors influencing performance of social housing provision. This phase also included undertaking a case study based on five different RSLs to examine the ‘real problems’ as to how and to what extent RSLs have adopted their organisation in order to meet the changes and challenges which they now face. The second phase investigated the key service factors impacting on housing maintenance strategy design and development through the use of a pilot study questionnaire directed to the asset managers (participating in the survey) and also included a selection of end users of the services (tenants). This phase identified the differences between the perceptions of service providers and the expectations of the service users. A key feature of this phase entailed conducting a workshop to disseminate findings of the pilot study. The workshop also formed a basis for ‘in-depth’ discussions for identifying the key factors, their descriptions, their interactions with each other, their inter-relationships with the tenant type, and their combined impact on formulating responsive housing maintenance strategy. The third phase of the study entailed eliciting qualitative data from the participants using the Repertory Grid (RG) ‘in-depth’ interview technique - a psychology tool in order to gain a deeper understanding of the core important ‘constructs’ and sub-constructs, their characteristics, their inter-relationships in the design and development of effective housing asset maintenance strategies. The fourth phase of this study entailed the development of a decision support system and the qualitative validation of the relationships found to exist between the constructs examined in phase three together with the testing of the model over a period of two months with four of the participating social housing providers. Findings The key findings arising from this research suggest that the design and development of value for money maintenance strategies within the public housing sector, are not solely based on physical factors related to the age, condition, location, construction type for example, but rather it was found that the majority of the asset management decisions made, were dependent upon a multivariate of key factors. The study identified 52 key factors, which when grouped together formed seven key cluster (Customer risk factors, Asset manager risk factors, Tenancy risk factors, Neighbourhood and community sustainability risk factors, Financial and economic risk factors, continuous service improvement risk factors and corporate risk factors) which are both ‘unique’ and ‘novel’ and are identified as having a direct influence on the formulation of housing maintenance strategy. These factors should not be considered in isolation and are more akin to the business success factors. The business ‘Balanced Scorecard’ (BSC) was evaluated and used as the basis for a ‘best fit’ model which was tested against four RSL to confirm its validity and its appropriateness. The responses obtained from these trials has indicated that the BSC provides a working tool capable of enhancing RSL organisational capabilities and service delivery effectiveness but also able to incorporate customer views regarding service delivery. This research makes major contributions to the existing limited pool of knowledge relating to strategic asset management within social housing sector and in addition, provides an insight into how housing maintenance strategy can be developed to incorporate feedback from customers (tenants) regarding the quality and responsive service delivery. The research also demonstrates the potential value of the BSC approach to the management tool capable of generating a competitive edge in line with government policy which is currently directed towards encouraging RSLs to adopt a commercial business approach to their operations. The research also demonstrates that the adoption of a decision support system in the form of BSC has the potential to provide useful assistance to RSLs intending to move away from the traditional public sector approaches to management (a more private sector orientated) approach to their operations. The research also shows that asset managers experience little difficulty in understanding the principles behind the BSC approach and its application. In addition, the cascading effect of BSC in housing maintenance strategy means that the strategy can be converted into measurable actions at the operational levels thereby providing a direct link between strategy and its implementation. Due to the absence of suitable benchmarking data, score rating derived from the RG were adopted by asset managers. This approach was found to be highly sensitive in assessing service delivery constructs.

Saskatchewan is facing a current infrastructure deficit, that is the current resources allocated to support its infrastructure are not in line with maintaining the current level of service into the future. This deficit has lead to a common assumption that assets are more likely to fail to provide their required service with age. While obsolescence and other factors may be related to age, the present work set out to investigate the relationship between probability of failure to provide service and expected life of assets, to allow asset managers to create more robust risk management strategies as part of their asset management plans. For the present work, failure is defined as any functional failure where the asset has not met its required level of service. By the functional failure definition, a failure can be any event from a short duration service interruption to catastrophic breakdown of an asset. The purpose of the present work is to look at probability of failure, and not consequence so assets will have two states in the study, fully meeting their required level of service (function) or not meeting their required level of service (functional failure). In the 1970s, two researchers with United Airlines, Nowlan and Heap, completed a study of when assets in aviation were likely to fail. The way failure is defined in their report is in line with the failure definition in the present work. Nowlan and Heap’s work lead to classifying failures into six different patterns. The largest group of failures, known as the F pattern, show that assets were more likely to fail early in their lives. The present work employed a similar study of its assets over a 13 month period to see if similar patterns could be found. To complete the study at the Saskatoon Water Treatment Plant, asset failure data was taken from the City’s Avantis Asset Management System. Failures were broken down by asset type and sub-type based on functionality to observe their age relative to expected life when they failed. The present work determined that the approach was sound and that there was sufficient data with some types of assets to fit to the patterns developed by Nowlan and Heap. The present work shows that likelihood of failure to provide service is not connected with age, and that additional study of the Saskatoon Water Treatment Plant asset’s is required in order to determine exact patterns of probability of failure for each of the assets types. After classifying the failures by each asset type, and accounting for errors in the data caused by the warranty period on assets that are maintained by the contractor, all types of assets were found to have higher occurrences of failure in the early portion of their lives than closer to the end of their expected life. Furthermore defining the shape of each asset type failures made it clear that age-based failure was not dominant. The study results lead to the conclusion that more research should be conducted not only at the Saskatoon WTP but with other infrastructure to better understand when assets are likely to fail to provide service so that probability can be integrated with risk management programs. Lastly this study has shown that it is not correct for asset managers to assume any pattern of failure for their assets without investigation.

M.Ing. / Ever since man had invented the wheel, or for that matter any of his first hand tools, he had a definite need to maintain that object. Man did not have any means to predict failures and he had no idea of how to prevent them. He could not plan for these failures and would not know what material and resources to have on hand. He was obviously restricted to a very primitive and elementary form of breakdown maintenance or a sort of run to break strategy as we would call that in modern maintenance terms. His success could only be measured in terms of the time to the next failure. Due to the nonexistence of engineering standards, the large standard deviation in mean time between maintenance (MTBF) values would render these same values rather useless for predictive purposes. This situation restricted our forefathers to a very reactive approach to maintenance. The astonishing present levels of sophistication in man's skills, engineering design and manufacturing came about through revolution and evolution. This indicates a huge amount of change that has taken place over the years and is still taking place today. As the world is in a constant state of change no business organization can escape the effects of operating m a continually evolving landscape. The very forces of change come about typically through industrial globalization, technological advance, political upheaval, the opening up of new markets and the changing expectations of customers that become more knowledgeable and demanding. For any business to respond to customer needs in a satisfactory manner, that business will have to be highly dependent on logistics. As logistics is a major contributor to life cycle cost (Blanchard, 1992: 70-84) and therefor impacts directly on profit margins, there is a growing need for more effective and efficient management of an organization's resources. Logistic support for any organization or plant is a major consideration in the early design stages of any system or organization or plant. From a logistic support perspective it becomes therefor necessary to assure the effective and economical support of a system, organization or plant throughout its programmed life cycle. One of the most important logistic support elements is maintenance. A lot has been said and written about maintenance. A number of well known philosophies and procedures (Blanchard, 1992: 9-25) such as 'planned preventive maintenance' (PPM), `condition based monitoring' (CBM), 'reliability centered maintenance' (RCM), 'total productive maintenance' (TPM), 'just in time' (JIT), 'life cycle costing' (LCC), etc. have been developed over many years and are applied throughout the world today. Techniques such as 'failure mode effect and criticality analysis' (FMECA), 'fault diagnostics', 'quality circles', and others have also been introduced to the industry. However various studies (Willmott, 1990: 17) have shown that present levels of maintenance management effectiveness are still unsatisfactory. One of the most important reasons for this state of affairs is that maintenance is still viewed by many organizations as a technical activity rather than an integrated management discipline. This misconception is then reinforced by several factors such as that the maintenance department is at its most visible when an emergency malfunction occurs. As soon as the malfunction has been restored, production carries on with its activities and no one asks the question why the breakdown was not anticipated before it occurred and disrupted production. A second reason is that maintenance managers view themselves as fire fighters and not as managers. A third reason is that the maintenance department is viewed as an organizational function with unpredictable response times and erratic priorities. All of these prejudices and misconceptions are costing industry dearly. This study will indicate that much can be done to transform the maintenance function of any organization to such an extent that costs are minimized and plant availability is improved that will ultimately lead to higher profit margins.

Recognition of maintenance management as a significant factor holds the key to competitiveness in the global market irrespective of the size of the business. Maintenance management practices are primarily found in larger and multinational companies but the purpose of this paper is to investigate the maintenance practices that are used in SMEs of Sweden (Kronoberg County). The study is expected to expose the level of maintenance perception in the Swedish industry via a postal (and web based) questionnaire. The survey covered 74 company chosen from different sectors and produced a response rate of 20.3 percent. The main results achieved from the study show us difference between the maintenance perception and awareness of the maintenance. The respondents are aware of the importance of maintenance, but maintenance is still perceived as a necessary expense. Because according to the results of the survey the percentage of maintenance budget in comparison to the companies’ turnover is on average about 0.97% and it is very low. Again, when we look at the maintenance cost distribution of companies, spare parts and labour costs consist of 73 % of total maintenance cost, despite that they spend very little money for technology and training costs, their percentages in total cost are just 3% and 2%, also they still ignore statistical modelling (historical data) and condition monitoring. Moreover, just 27% of the participants use the maintenance key performance indicators (KPIs), and just 14% of them used basic KPIs which are used for measuring maintenance performance. There is a need to spend and invest more in maintenance especially they should invest more in technology and training to perform them. On the other hand, there is a need for choosing right maintenance strategy and service type, because these points are very important for an effective and economic maintenance management.

In contrast to the declining numbers of new-cars sold in Taiwan, the revenue of car repairing has grown year by year. However, many third-party (non- manufacturer -owned) garages still went bankrupt every month. Therefore, for keeping their profitability and sustainability, those third-party garages need to boost their competitiveness. The main purpose of this research is to find the methods of increasing third-party garage¡¦s competitiveness. This research uses simulative skills to study the selected object. The scope of this study contains the third-party garages¡¦ maintenance management system, cooperative models with suppliers, and customer relationship.

M.Ing. (Engineering Management) / Since the beginning of the knowledge era, individuals powered their ideals on the 20th century’s industrial knowledge age, also defined as “the power of knowledge”. The modern day knowledge era will use the collective intelligence of diverse groups to collaborate for specific purposes and objectives. Society and education developed from the “know what” and “know how” age to “what is the best way”. (NZCER, 2010) Leading into the 21st century, organisations are forced to adapt to a new state of mind and use a diverse knowledge spectrum to solve the problems of the future. This mind-set is being challenged by a recent recession and cautious investment future. The recession initiated a negative impact on the global markets and forced most organisations to become innovative and use their collective knowledge. (NZCER, 2010) This investigation is based on an increment of the global corporate environment. The collective thinking principle can be used to achieve success in an organisation based on a first and third world country, i.e. South Africa. The concern, Hall Longmore (Pty) Ltd. opened its doors to a 21st century strategic solution in respect of its maintenance department. Maintenance at the concern is currently a decentralised employee structure, where the current culture of the group impacts negatively on the performance of the department. During the industrial age this would have been solved by implementing autocratic structures and strict discipline on employees. This management style is feasible in the short term, but how do employees stay motivated, creative and innovative over time? World class maintenance programs need a clear vision to become a unified labour force functioning with an innovative and creative approach. The key aspects of the initial state need to be investigated and understood before decisions can begin towards reinstating the desired culture and behaviour. The aim of this dissertation is to change the paradigm of the autocratic 20th century management style relating to the maintenance function, which aims to decrease cost and increase reliability and availability to a more performance driven culture and integrated workforce, which will create a high performance concern through its actions.

In a production environment, physical and cyber-related failures become unavoidable because of the complexity of highly connected manufacturing systems and a finite equipment life cycle. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate optimal maintenance outsourcing and replacement policies in the presence of cyber-threats, as well as policies to achieve channel coordination via cost subsidization. Although well-developed maintenance outsourcing literature has addressed many advanced and trending issues such as the costs and benefits of new technology adoptions, learning effects, forgetting effects, and systems with back-up machines, no study has looked at the effect of cyber threats on connected production systems. Besides filling this gap, this thesis addresses the most common replacement policies including preventive maintenance with minimal repairs and age replacement. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled the creation of "smart" manufacturing systems, However the resulting connected format makes these systems potential targets for cyber-attacks. Manufacturers have to face a difficult decision as to whether they should adopt costly security technologies or let the manufacturing systems be vulnerable to cyber-threats. This study develops a model addressing this dilemma by providing some insights into the effects of cost subsidization and installation of security systems on the system profit. Our findings suggest that a manufacturer can trade off cost subsidization to gain flexibility in the maintenance decision-making process. The study also provides evidence that, for a "smart" manufacturing system, the existence of a security system guarantees at least a marginal increase in system profit. With the help of an extensive numerical study, we provide guidelines for optimizing system profit and addressing the effect of various model parameters (such as a monetary parameter, failure rate and a cyber-attack related parameter) on the value of a security system.In the second part of this thesis, we build analytical models to deal with cyber-threats in the context of a production system that utilizes the age replacement policy. We propose two different scenarios involving cyber-threats. First, cyber-attacks do not disrupt the physical production system. In this case, we replace the broken components either when the system has a physical breakdown or when a predetermined amount of time (T) elapses. Second, we need to replace the system right after it suffers from a successful cyber-attack. Thus, we replace the system components if one of three following events happen, whichever comes first: (1) a successful cyber-attack, (2) a physical breakdown, or (3) a predetermined time (T) elapses. We analytically provide optimal policies to minimize the expected cost for these scenarios. Finally, we carry out sensitivity analyses to show the effect of different model parameters on the value of a cyber security system.