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Abstract: Many organisations invest a considerable amount of capital and resources, implementing new techniques to improve their performance. An effective management of production and maintenance and processes is vital for economic viability and a long term survival of many industries. In fact, an effective and efficient maintenance process is essential to assure asset performance. With this recognition, the asset and maintenance management has become an indispensable element of strategic thinking of asset owners and asset managers. This research aims to investigate the interaction between quality management, production and maintenance performance. The relevant theoretical foundations and research gaps are presented first, followed by development of a conceptual framework. The framework builds upon resource-based theory (RBT) literature to develop a conceptual framework, mainly to understand how company’s resources could contribute to company’s performance. Based on this theoretical underpinning two main research streams are studied, namely quality management in maintenance and asset management. Different sources of data were utilized to answer the proposed research questions. The thesis includes two large-scale surveys (among Slovenian organizations as well as an international survey conducted in Slovenia, Sweden, Poland, Slovakia, Greece and Turkey) and two empirical case studies. The outcome of regression analysis provides the evidence that quality management orientation is an important predictor of maintenance performance. By testing the impact of quality management orientation on maintenance performance, this research shows that strong foundation on quality management orientation is an effective way of improving maintenance performance. Further, by examining continuous improvement in relation to maintenance performance, this research seeks to examine the role of quality management practices in achieving maintenance performance. In this regard it was found that continuous improvement significantly and positively affects the maintenance performance. In addition, results of this research revealed a mediator effect of continuous improvement on the relationship between quality management orientation and maintenance performance. Moreover, this research examines the relationship between physical asset management practices and sustainability and operational performance as well. The research is based on a premise that asset management, which comprises of risk management practices, performance assessment practices, life cycle management practices, policy & strategy practices, leads to improved organizational performance. The results of this research provide the evidence to support the hypotheses and to demonstrate that organizations can benefit from the implementation of asset management practices. The MANOVA furthermore provides interesting insights into the effects of asset management practices on the organizational performance. The results indicate that there are significant mean differences in organizational performance dimensions (as measured by the business performance, environmental performance, social performance and operational performance) for low and high levels of asset management practices. Therefore, by focusing on asset management practices, organizations can expect to achieve higher performance outcomes. In addition a comparison between Slovenian and Polish data subset was performed. The results revealed some distinct elements, namely regarding the performance outcome. For example, the results indicate that Slovenian organizations achieved higher scores in business, environmental and operational performance, while Polish organizations achieved higher scores in social performance.
Keywords: quality management, asset management, maintenance, production, performance
Published in DKUM: 12.06.2018; Views: 2032; Downloads: 136
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