CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Preamble
Small and Medium Industries SMI are the key contributors to economic growth in Malaysia and their background are explained in section two of this chapter.
The section elaborates on how SMI have been established and their classifications, followed by their contribution to generating employment and income to the country.
In the long run, SMI in Malaysia are expected to excel in line with policies and incentives introduced by the government. The main objectives of their businesses are
to engage in small- and medium-scale manufacturing lines to generate profit and employment. Despite this, when compared to SMI in many other developed
economies, such as Japan, Australia and Germany, the local players have clearly not reached their full potential. One of the factors that is lacking is technology
management, i.e. machinery maintenance. Thus, the effect of machinery failures is presented in the next section of this chapter.
Section three gives a background on the maintenance and computerized system, followed by a background on the decision support and optimization system in
section four. Development of maintenance decision support models will help to
provide alternatives, strategies and solutions in maintenance activities. For instance, it
may require the re-layout of production lines, staff re-engineering, re-structure of the contractors, maintenance re-scheduling, etc. Section five explains the decision
support system in computerized maintenance management system with the Holonic concept. It continues with a brief description of the decision-making grid and an
introduction to the analytical hierarchical process.
Poor machinery maintenance management will result in capacity loss, poor product quality and customer dissatisfaction. These downturns usually occur
depending on the effectiveness of the reliability of programs executed by the organization. The performance of a maintenance team in bringing up the machine is
very difficult to measure accurately. This is because the outcome of a service process is inherently much more inconsistent issues in quality than the manufacturing
counterparts. Furthermore, the service process is difficult and expensive to control. Section six discusses these issues in SMI. The section continues with statements of
the problems, and research questions. Section seven gives the objectives of our studies, and section eight provides the scope of the study. Section nine provides the
significance of the study, the organisation of the thesis is explained in section ten, and the conclusion is in section eleven.
1.2 Background to Small and Medium Industries
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