Track: Operations Management

Abstract

The current economic growth has pushed the manufacturing sector to go through important changes over the past decade. The main reason of this situation is due to the current course of competition, which has been dramatically increasing in the local as well as global market. Consequently, the focus of both products’ manufacturers and customers has been on the quality, delivery time, as well as product’ cost. Due to these, many manufacturing industries seek to develop and implement a quality system to constantly enhance and increase both quality and throughput. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is considered as an approach aiming to guarantee an effective management of company’s resources by means of employee participation and empowerment, as well as to augment the availability, quality, and product throughput to reduce the need for additional capital investment. To this end, the present paper proposes TPM as a roadmap for South African food manufacturing industry. Mixed methodology was used to obtain out of this study best possible results. The study was conducted at a larger South African food manufacturing company that has two sister companies (subsidiary A and B).  both primary and secondary data were collected. The productivity and values of overall equipment effectiveness of both subsidiary A and B were calculated by employing standard equations. The findings revealed potential major challenges faced by those two sister companies. It was also shown in this study that both sister companies have less rate of overall equipment effectiveness when comparing to the world standard values, which caused many failures. Furthermore, there is a variation in terms of values of overall equipment effectiveness, performance, availability, and quality at both sister companies. Despite this fluctuation of value, we noticed that subsidiary A has got better performance than subsidiary B regarding productivity and overall equipment performance.