An investigation into the relationship between Egyptian maintenace culture and TPM implementation

The importance of effective maintenance of production facilities and systems has increased rapidly as many organisations aim to become world class. Even more so for Egyptian manufacturing organisations since in recent years, they have been faced with increasing national and international competition while struggling with issues such as high scrap levels, long lead times and many other sources of waste in production and processes, making it necessary for them to revise their maintenance strategies to effectively maintain their production facilities and systems if they seek to achieve world class status. Becoming world class requires building the right management environment and shop floor culture. Experience has shown that equipment and process problems are the root cause of many of the unplanned events that reinforce a reactive management style. Delivering reliable equipment on its own however, is not enough to deliver superior company performance. TPM has evolved to address wider management issues and company-wide TPM has shown itself to be an enabler capable of achieving world class manufacturing (WCM). This study explores the vanous issues involved ID implementing Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) in the Egyptian manufacturing context, with a particular focus on Egyptian organisational culture. The study focuses on the cultural factors that might arise from implementing TPM in an Egyptian manufacturing context rather than the technical aspects ofTPM implementation. Accordingly the research tackles two main issues: • Establishing the relationship between Egyptian maintenance culture and TPM implementation • Identifying the critical success factors for implementation of TPM in an Egyptian manufacturing context. The research strategies adopted in this study are primarily qualitative but with a combination of quantitative methods as well. First, a detailed literature review was conducted followed by unstructured interviews conducted with officials and consultants in the Egyptian Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Industrial Modernization Center and the Egyptian Organisation for Standardisation and Quality. Then a questionnaire survey and structured interviews were conducted in several manufacturing companies in the Borg El-Arab industrial zone. Finally, a single case study was carried out in an Egyptian manufacturing company that has been successfully implementing TPM for more than 5 years and steadily making progress in the direction of achieving world class status. The main contribution to knowledge from this thesis is the identification of the cultural factors that affect the success of TPM in Egyptian manufacturing organisations and the development of a framework for successful implementation of TPM in Egyptian manufacturing organisations. The limitations of this research are that the results cannot be generalised to all Egyptian manufacturing industries since the study was conducted in only one industrial zone with a small sample size and the case study in only one company, but rather it produces a snapshot of Egyptian maintenance culture and the critical success factors specific to the Egyptian manufacturing context.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo