Learning effects on maintenance outsourcing

Tarakci, Hakan; Tang, Kwei; Teyarachakul, Sunantha

doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2007.09.016

Cited by 65 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This has led to a great number of start-up industri al service companies throughout the world (Hilletofth and Hilmola, 2010). The industrial maintenance of manufacturing enterprises is one of the services outsourced more and more often (Tarakci et al, 2009). In an international survey conducted by the European Federation of National Maintenance Societies (2011), 24% of the surveyed companies had outsourced their maintenance activities.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Profitable working capital management in industrial maintenance companies

Marttonen

Monto

Kärri

2013

Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of working capital management on profitability in industrial maintenance service companies.Design/methodology/approach -Analytical modeling has been used as the research method. Finnish industrial maintenance companies have been analyzed on the basis of their financial statements.Findings -We reveal a significant negative correlation between the cycle times of operational working capital and the return on investment of industrial maintenance companies. Ligth fixed assets and good profitability of the maintenance sector emphasize the importance of working capital management. Large maintenance service companies seem to achieve competitive advantage over small and medium sized maintenance service providers through both fixed assets-and working capital-related economies of scale, and through the fact that large maintenance service providers often focus on providing services mostly for their host companies.Research limitations -The scarcity of large enterprises in the market in question precludes the use of a more extensive sample in the analysis.Practical implications -In the industrial maintenance service business, more attention should be paid to active management of working capital. We can conclude that this holds true especially in large industrial maintenance service enterprises.Originality/value -We contribute to the unexplored perspective of industrial maintenance companies. Previous studies of industrial maintenance companies have not addressed working capital management, which gains more and more attention under the volatile economic circumstances of the present day.Keywords Industrial maintenance services, Profitability, Working capital, Flexible asset management model Paper type Research paper IntroductionThe focus of this paper is on the working capital management of industrial maintenance service providers. There is not much previous research about industrial maintenance service providers, although maintenance performance has grown t o be of high importance to industrial companies (e.g. Al-Turki 2011;Simões et al., 2011). Previous research has been mainly done from the point of view of service buyers, concerning mostly outsourcing. On the other hand, several researchers have already linked the asset management perspective to the company-level goals and profitability (e.g. Aoudia et al., 2008;Tam and Price 2008). Considering the present state of industrial services, the global trend towards networkin g and focusing on core competences has led to some notable changes (Broedner et al., 2009;Boulaksil and Fransoo, 2010;Holschbach and Hofmann, 2011). A vast majority of outsourced business functions can be classified as services (Bailey et al., 2002;Benson and Ieronimo, 1996;Kakabadse and Kakabadse, 2002;Harland et al., 2005;McIvor et al., 2009). Bailey et al. (2002) reported that 70% of the companies in their research sample had outsourced one or more of their business functions. Gradually the outsourcing practi ce has extended to more and m...

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Profitable working capital management in industrial maintenance companies

Marttonen

Monto

Kärri

2013

Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Armbruster et al (2007) dealt with bucket brigades production lines with worker learning. Tarakci et al (2009) looked at learning effects on maintenance outsourcing. Jaber and Bonney (2003), Jaber et al (2009), andKhan (2010) considered the lot-sizing or lot-splitting problem with learning.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developing a plant system prediction model for technology transfer

Yamane

Takahashi

Hamada

et al. 2015

International Journal of Production Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Tarakci, Tang, and Teyarachakul (2009) studied the effects of learning on maintenance outsourcing. They considered both learning through experience and also learning due to costly investments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two types of learning effects on maintenance activities

Tarakci

2015

International Journal of Production Research

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper studies a manufacturer with a system prone to failure. The manufacturer performs two types of maintenance activities: preventive maintenance (PM), performed periodically, resets the system, and Minimal Repair (MR), performed after breakdowns, restores the system to working condition. It is assumed that two different types of learning take place: (i) repetition learning: due to the repetitive nature of PM, the manufacturer gains experience and learns to perform the PM activities faster and at a lower cost and (ii) failure learning: each failure gives the manufacturer the opportunity to find the root causes, to learn from mistakes and to improve the system. This paper, the first one to quantify failure learning in maintenance literature, assumes that such learning can then be applied during the next PM activity, which brings down the failure rate for the next PM cycle. For the increasing failure rate case, repetition learning increases the PM frequency, whereas failure learning causes the manufacturer to reduce the optimal number of PM activities. However, for the constant failure rate, repetition learning has no effect on the PM frequency, whereas failure learning may actually increase it.

show abstract

Learning effects on maintenance outsourcing

Cited by 65 publications

References 28 publications

Profitable working capital management in industrial maintenance companies

Profitable working capital management in industrial maintenance companies

Developing a plant system prediction model for technology transfer

Two types of learning effects on maintenance activities

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About