Implementation of Maintenance Management in a Medium Size Industry for Optimization of Maintenance Cost : A Case Study

Maintenance in Indian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is regarded as a capital-extensive approach rather than profit-making approach. The position of management is held by the owner himself in most of the Indian organizations and management always thinks to optimize the overall expenditure on equipment maintenance in SMEs. In this paper, the authors introduce a new concept of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) as Maintenance Management (MM) for optimizing recurring maintenance costs by using Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) approach. The effective maintenance strategies in the manufacturing organization can help to save a huge amount of time, money and other useful resources. Generally, owners are worried about low production and its product quality, but do not try to find the causes behind this problem in SMEs. The authors in this study identify many difficulties and suggest an action plan for the same after finding the causes of these problems. The authors observe a drastic change in the targeted organization after adoption of MM