Abstract
Organisations nowadays are placing more emphasis on availability and reliability of systems, including safety in production plants. The uptime of production systems substantially contributes to an organisation’s productiveness, and the organisation's ability to become or remain competitive; for this reason, maintenance is now known to be compulsory and necessary. Companies are now changing their organisational maintenance policy from that of being reactive to more preventative strategies. This research was conducted at ArcelorMittal South Africa, which is situated in Vanderbijlpark, Gauteng province. The research aims to address the issues concerning maintenance that are occurring at ArcelorMittal South Africa, through assessing the maintenance planning policy which is being applied at the ArcerlorMittal plant so that the organisation can move toward a more preventative environment. Currently, the organisation has an operative preventative maintenance policy, though the failures and unplanned system stoppages are initiating maintenance to arise in a reactive approach. The research further aims to draw forward aspects that contribute to poor preventative maintenance planning. The study outlined three research objectives: (1) to determine the period in which preventative maintenance could have been conducted by reviewing the system's failure data; (2) to identify the requirements for enhancing machine reliability; and (3) to assess how often preventative maintenance is being performed at the organisation...
M.Tech. (Operations Management)