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Development of an effective maintenance concept for enhancement of competitive advantage : a case study of East African Portland Cement Company
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Ombogo, Japheth |
| Copyright Year | 2017 |
| Abstract | Due to global competition, many organizations are coming up with ways of sharpening their competitive edge. This has been achieved through cost leadership, differentiation of goods and services and lastly, through quick response to the needs of the customers. To respond to these market requirements, manufacturers are using high-tech equipment. They are also adopting new material control methods such as Just-In-Time philosophy. Set-up costs are also being minimized to a minimum. All these factors are shifting the focus to maintenance since unreliability and availability of manufacturing equipment will result in high maintenance costs, low profitability, low production and an increase in customer dissatisfaction. At East African Portland Cement Company, the raw mill plant has led to the above problems which in turn lead to negative feedbacks from the customers and as a result, there is need to develop a maintenance concept that will respond to the challenges mentioned above. Consequently, in this research an analysis of various the maintenance concepts were investigated. Overall Equipment Effectiveness of the Raw mill plant was evaluated and analyzed. Downtime analysis was also done to establish the major causes of low plant availability. From the research, it can be deduced that East African Portland Cement Company requires a harmonized maintenance concept regarding inspection, regular maintenance; repair and overhaul, scheduled and preventive maintenance of the main components as well as environmental auditing during operation to ensure that the plant is fully operational and efficient. Total Productive Maintenance concept therefore has been identified as key to the meeting of organizational objectives of the company. A customized framework of Total productive maintenance deployment at East African Portland Cement Company has been developed with six step transformation steps used in embedding high performance culture. It is expected that an implementation of this project will lead to a reduction in failures, time to perform a repair and an elongation in the mean time between failures hence higher plant availability and reliability for improved productivity. 79 (c) IEOM Introduction The ever-increasing competition in today’s industry has compelled delivery commitments and operating costs to be an important consideration when securing customers. Costs associated with equipment breakdowns, degraded equipment and unavailability of spares and data, lead to downtime of the plant, production losses and wasteful activities. In order to meet increased market expectations and reduce operating costs, industries have focused efforts on reducing unplanned downtime. The maintenance department is being increasingly viewed as an indispensable function of the production system. Maintenance has been largely considered as a support function which is none productive since it does not generate cash directly. However for industry to produce goods of the right quality and quantity for the customers and be able to deliver them at the right time, its plant or equipment must operate efficiently and accurately. For every manufacturing company the objective is to produce goods at a profit and this is only achieved by using an effective maintenance system that helps maximize availability by minimizing machine downtime due to unwarranted stoppages. Without an effective and economically viable maintenance system, equipment reliability suffers, and the plant pays the price with poor availability and increased downtime. All these mentioned poor key performance indicators (KPIs) could be as a result of poor machine condition and sometimes low employee morale. Low plant availability and overtime costs will negatively affect an industry’s operational efficiency. Plant Engineers must therefore design an effective maintenance system for the plant and its equipment. Frequent machine breakdowns, low plant availability and increased overtime are a great threat to East Africa Portland Cement Company (EAPCC) as they increase operating costs of an industry. EAPCC has initiated a maintenance improvement plan to minimize equipment downtime and increase equipment availability. The plant’s current maintenance program is reactive and plant machinery suffers from a high level of downtime. Consequently, the 2009/2010 financial year was characterized with a loss of three hundred million shillings as a result of operation inefficiencies. This has necessitated this study because an increase in the availability will lead to increase in production, reduction in costs and consequently an increase in the profitability of the organization. The objective of this research is to investigate how to improve Overall Equipment Effectiveness of the raw mill plant through implementation of an effective maintenance concept. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://ieomsociety.org/bogota2017/papers/20.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://ieomsociety.org/ieom2017/papers/608.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
