Maintenance and Reliability in Businesses Essay

The modern business environment is significantly sophisticated, and due to this, many factors affect an enterprise's capacity to compete with others effectively. Most businesses currently are competing on different factors, for instance, information management, reliability, quality, innovation, technology, price, and time among others. Among all, reliability and maintenance are essential strategies which can impact a business capacity to compete with others effectively.

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Maintenance and reliability influences three fundamental components of competitiveness namely cost, quality, and commodity lead time. This is because well-maintained machines tend to hold better tolerance, aid in decreasing rework and scrap and increase part quality and consistency (Gupta & Mishra, 2016). Therefore, by escalating uptime and production of better parts, maintenance and reliability decrease capital needs hence reducing production expenses. Additionally, maintenance and reliability decreases lead times through diminishing downtime as well as the requirement for retooling. These outcomes enable those businesses which use maintenance and reliability to enjoy these results as benefits hence they achieve competitive edge compared to those that do not employ it

Focusing on maintenance and reliability helps businesses avoid entering into a spiral of value destruction. This destruction occurs when enterprises decrease their budgets which results in increased backlogs of predictive and preventive maintenance activities. These tasks, in turn, translate into more breakdowns (Schilke, 2014). Better equipment reliability leads to improved profit as well as cost performance. It furthermore has a spin-off advantage regarding increased safety and reducing environmental occurrences. This decreases the need for management energy required to react to regular unplanned incidents. Thus, maintenance and reliability are crucial in decreasing maintenance and operating expenses while increasing profit. This creates a significant source of a competitive edge since maintenance and reliability helps a business to attain short-term gains and ensure that they are constant in the long run.

Conclusion

Maintenance and reliability have been found to be essential in helping businesses achieve a competitive edge. This is through the effect of decreasing rework and scrap while increasing part quality and consistency. They also decrease capital needs and reduce production expenses. Additionally, they aid businesses avoid entering into a spiral of value destruction, leads to improved profit as well as cost performance, and decreases the need for management energy required to react to regular unplanned incidents. All these approaches of maintenance and reliability strategy are ways of providing a competitive advantage to those firm that embraces them.

References

Gupta, G., & Mishra, R. P. (2016). A SWOT analysis of reliability centred maintenance framework. Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, 22(2), 130-145.

Schilke, O. (2014). On the contingent value of dynamic capabilities for competitive advantage: The nonlinear moderating effect of environmental dynamism. Strategic management journal, 35(2), 179-203.