Search the digital library catalog

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: 12.06.2018; Views: 932; Downloads: 89
Full text (2,97 MB)

Abstract: The specifics of process manufacturing have a great influence on production management. The focus of process-production control is to maintain stable and cost-effective production within given constraints. The synthesis of production-control structures is thus recognized as one of the most important design problems in process-production management. This article proposes a closed-loop control structure with the utilization of production-performance indicators (pPIs) as a possible solution to this problem. Suggested concept takes into account also economic issues of production. pPIs represent the translation of operating objectives, such as the minimization of production costs, to a reduced set of control variables that can then be used in a feedback control. The idea of production-feedback control using production pPIs as controlled variables was implemented on a procedural model of a production process for a polymerization plant. Preliminary results demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology. At the implementation stage we must be aware that appropriate IT system has to be available which ensures needed online production data.
Keywords: production management, production control, production performance indicators, model-based control
Published: 10.01.2018; Views: 1421; Downloads: 233
Full text (963,78 KB)
This document has many files! More...

Abstract: The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most competitive businesses in the world. Supply chain in this industry has been directed towards the production of large batches to avoid lack of supplies, and the achievement of regulatory requirements, at the cost of high level of inventory, higher costs and inventory write-off due to expiration or other reasons. In recent years this industry is facing major changes and challenges such as intense globalization processes, increased competition and innovations in technologies, which has broadened and deepened risks in supply chain. The paper reports the results of the study of the risk in distribution processes of Slovenian pharmaceutical companies, which was conducted among five companies and aims to draw attention to risks that arise in supply chain, to emphasize the importance of their management and to present a model for an effective assessment of risk in companies, developed at the Faculty of Logistics.
Keywords: risk management, risk catalog, production companies, pharmaceutical industry, distribution, logistics, Slovenia
Published: 06.07.2017; Views: 608; Downloads: 308
Full text (115,52 KB)
This document has many files! More...

Keywords: retail sale, production management, products, allocation, space, store space, selection problem, supply, concession, management, merchandising, prices, profit, decision making, business, business operation, quantitative analysis, store, design, international trade, international business, strategy, information sources, textbooks
Published: 01.06.2012; Views: 1708; Downloads: 51
Link to full text

Abstract: An intelligent manufacturing system is intended to produce one or more subjects that it is designed for in an optimal way. This means that it has to find a proper production process to produce the subject in an optimal way. The manufacturing system can be called "intelligent" when it is able to find applicable optimisation criteria upon its past experiences thus improving its performance in future. Therefore, an intelligent manufacturing system needs capabilities to store data and make decisions upon them. Such a "brain" can be established by a proper design of a technological database and its database management system (DBMS). Examining all constitutive parameters of a work operation a model of a production process organization can be made, which can serve as a basis for a suitable database design. In addition, an application programme that will check the existence and availability of work operations in the database has to be added to the DBMS. What remains are some optimisation criteria upon which we will choose an operation among suitable and available work operations. This task is fulfilled by a genetic algorithm optimisation technique that would consider work operations' data as parameters of optimisation and on this basis search the optimal one out of the set of available operation.
Keywords: production processes, optimisation, relational database, database management systems, production automation, manufacturing system
Published: 01.06.2012; Views: 1318; Downloads: 98
Link to full text