Plant maintenance management practices in automobile industries: A retrospective and literature review

This paper endeavors to present a classification, review and analysis of the literature on Plant Maintenance Management Practices (PMMP) employed in Automobile Industries. There is a considerable amount of published research available concerning plant maintenance during the last few decades. Similarly many research articles are available which focuses on various aspects of automobile industries. However, very few studies focus on critical examination of maintenance practices in Automobile Industries in particular. Hence considering the slump in automobile industries in the recent times, a wide-ranging and focused review is attempted here and only those researches have been examined which mainly concentrates on this core aspect. Thus one of the objectives of this literature review is to investigate the present state of Plant Maintenance Management Practices, based on studies conducted in different countries and published in a variety of journals over the past two decades. An examination of 55 pertinent research studies have shown that the publications can be grouped in two categories namely Conceptual and Empirical Research. An analysis of these research articles published between 1990 and 2008, revealed that current maintenance practices ranges from conventional to the latest techniques for optimizing maintenance function like TPM, RCM and Proactive Maintenance. These studies focused more on maintenance problem solving and the main difficulties are reported along with probable solutions. Another goal of the paper is to analyze the articles by year and type of journal they were published in, to determine the trends in maintenance management studies and recommend future direction for research.