Towards an Holistic Understanding of Disruptions in Operations Management

Journal article, 2000

The paper reviews the literature on maintenance management, integrates key dimensions of maintenance within a taxonomy of maintenance configurations, and explores the impact of differing configurations on contextual factors and operational performance. 'Prevention', 'hard maintenance integration' and 'soft maintenance integration' were identified as key maintenance variables. Data were collected from 253 Swedish manufacturing companies, and three distinct clusters were identified. 'Proactive Maintainers' emphasized preventive maintenance policies. 'IT Maintainers' relied on computerized and company-wide integrated information systems for maintenance. 'Maintenance Laggers' emphasized all maintenance dimensions to lesser extent than the others. The importance of maintenance prevention and integration differ between contexts. There were subtle performance differences across identified configurations, but preventive and integrated maintenance were more important for companies seeking competitive process control and flexibility. There existed no group with any great emphasis on all three maintenance dimensions, but attaining truly high performance may require a rare mix of the three dimensions. This mix of variables could constitute a hypothesized 'World Class Maintenance' group.