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1. Introduction
The rapid and continuous growth in the globalisation of most industrial operations has significantly shifted the paradigm of competitiveness away from monopoly and more towards perfect competition. The pressures exerted by this paradigm shift are immense, especially in the areas of waste elimination and the implementation of cost-effective strategies that can avert or significantly minimise critical plant downtimes. The fundamental objective of most organisations is the transformation of raw materials into finished products, which may be tangible or non-tangible. The effective achievement of this transformation process requires that the influence of crucial elements such as men, machines, methods, materials and money (i.e. the 5Ms) is well-managed. The burden of managing an industrial plant grossly rests on the shoulders of two key plant functions, namely production and maintenance. Traditionally, the production function is directly concerned with the generation of the finished goods from the various raw materials. This invariably implies that the production function is the custodian of all machines which is perhaps why production is arguably referred to as the main reason for the existence of most manufacturing organisations. However, owing to a highly dynamic operational environment (e.g. load and speed variations), virtually all industrial machines are susceptible to failures which lead to plant downtimes.
In a study conducted by Eti et al. (2006), it was reported that even the world’s best performing organisations within the chemical industry still incur annual maintenance costs of up to 1-2 per cent of the present replacement values of their plant assets. On the other hand, organisations with less-efficient maintenance management systems can incur costs in excess of 5 per cent of the present asset replacement value. In other industries, the cost of inefficient maintenance practices can be more severe to organisations. For instance (Mckone and Weiss, 1998) stated in their study that the company-wide spending on maintenance by some organisations could be equivalent to their net income especially when the indirect impacts of maintenance (e.g. loss of income as a result of failures, substandard product quality, drop in market shares, loss of customers’ confidence, etc.) are adequately considered (Al-Najjar, 1996, 2007; Ljungberg, 1998; Coetzee, 1999; Kutucuoglu et al., 2001; Miller, 2000; Al-Najjar and Alsyouf, 2004; Alsyouf, 2007). Maintenance activities are widely regarded as deterrents to...