Abstract
Historically, the maintenance function of an organisation was viewed as a ‘necessary evil’; however, the view has shifted to seeing it as a strategic element within an organisation to accomplish its business objectives. For organisations to continue to be competitive, they need to harness the true potential of their people by evaluating ways for maintenance teams to achieve effective teamwork. In the light of this, the study was tailored to determine the factors that characterise high-performing maintenance teams in the petrochemical industry in South Africa. The study determined an importance ranking of these critical factors when implementing high-performance maintenance teams. A questionnaire was used to gather quantitative data from 69 respondents. Analysis of the data revealed that the most important factors for maintenance teams to achieve high performance were knowledge and motivation. It was also found that the most important performance indicators for maintenance were equipment availability, overall equipment effectiveness, and spares availability.
Highlights
1.1 BackgroundIn the face of the organisational challenges brought by the growth of the digital revolution and the introduction of new and disruptive technologies, organisations are required to adapt and transform in order to function in a world where dynamism, competitiveness, and the ‘war for talent’ is the norm
With the introduction of lean manufacturing principles in industry, a popular approach used in organisations to improve maintenance performance is total productive maintenance (TPM), which highlights the importance of teamwork to eliminate losses within a maintenance organisation [3]
In order to achieve variation and to be able to generalise the results for the entire petrochemical industry, two operating entities were selected for the study, from which the distribution of the responses received was a 65 to 35 per cent split between them
Summary
1.1 BackgroundIn the face of the organisational challenges brought by the growth of the digital revolution and the introduction of new and disruptive technologies, organisations are required to adapt and transform in order to function in a world where dynamism, competitiveness, and the ‘war for talent’ is the norm. The industry is faced with a serious challenge: the last of the baby boom generation workforce are on their way out, and with their departure “goes the knowledge which has not been effectively retained for the generation” [2]. With the introduction of lean manufacturing principles in industry, a popular approach used in organisations to improve maintenance performance is total productive maintenance (TPM), which highlights the importance of teamwork to eliminate losses within a maintenance organisation [3]. Adopting a team-based approach to improve team performance has proved effective in many organisations, as mentioned by [4] and [5]. In support of this, [6] explain how organisations are using work teams to recreate themselves and improve team performance, while [2] state that organisations that strive for excellence are generally teambased
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