Introduction
A trend has been currently growing to increase efficiency of business logistics chains through their
interlacing with logistics systems of suppliers and customers. Integration of business logistics systems in
supply chains requires the establishment of more or less close cooperation of individual members of the
chain. The supply chain collaboration is often defined as two or more enterprises working together to create
a competitive advantage and higher profits that cannot be achieved by acting alone (Simatupang &
Sridharan, 2005). The highest effects in terms of logistics performance improvement are achieved by
applying modern methods of supply chain management, such as Quick Response (QR), Efficient Consumer
Response (ECR), Vendor Managed Inventory (VM) or Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and
Replenishment (CPFR). According to McMichael at al (McMichel & Mackay & Altman, 2000) QR is
defined as a consumer driven business strategy of cooperative planning by supply chain partners, to ensure
that the right goods, are in the right place, at the right time, using IT and flexible manufacturing to eliminate
inefficiencies from the entire supply chain.
A necessary precondition for the implementation of material flow by the supply chain based on the
methods described above is the reliability of production facilities constituting the production system of each
company. All systems based on synchronization of material flows fail if production facilities in each
successive production show a high number of accidents and subsequent repairs after failure. For this reason,
the maintenance in Quick Response systems is extremely important.
Professional literature has not as yet addressed the problem of how to manage the maintenance in the
Quick Response systems. In general, it deals with methods which allow increasing reliability of the
production equipment, such as the TPM and RCM methods in particular. Mostly, however, these methods
are described and discussed in isolation. Radical increase in maintenance efficiency can be achieved,
however, just through a combination of principles of these methods. The professional literature also has not
yet substantially dealt with the way the implementation of the Quick Response influences supporting
business processes. For now, one can not find any theoretical view on how the maintenance system should be
modified due to application of the Quick Response method. Therefore, the publication is focused on this
issue.
The main goal of this paper is a proposal for modification of maintenance system in an enterprise that
is part of a supply chain operating on the basis of the Quick Response method.
The proposal accents two main ideas, namely:
• This maintenance system must be clearly focused on prevention. It should be conceived on the
basis of some modern methods of maintenance, such as TPM and RCM methods. But a modern,
fully functional maintenance system can be designed being based on several of these methods,
whose principles it uses and appropriately combines.