Abstract
Organisations are directing their efforts to adopt suitable maintenance strategies to minimize equipment downtime and cost. Managers within an organization are being called to understand the correlation between maintenance process outputs and inputs of different operations based on how they contribute to the business objective.
This has caused manufacturing companies to focus more on equipment reliability as they optimize their maintenance strategy to ensure that operating equipment is in good working condition and improve company productivity.
Clause 7.1.5 of ISO 9001:2015(E) requires production companies to provide the resources needed to ensure valid and reliable results when monitoring or verifying the conformity of their product or service to set requirements. The resources used for monitoring or measurement should be maintained to ensure their continuing fitness.
To achieve this, many companies use laboratory test results to measure and monitor the validity and reliability of their product or service and evaluate its conformity to set requirements. This creates a need to ensure that equipment used to test or measure production products or services has effective maintenance strategies.
To achieve this, laboratory equipment should function correctly and be readily available. This requires test and calibration laboratories to have an effective maintenance strategy so that the laboratory equipment is available and remains fit for its intended purpose. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the laboratory equipment strategy to determine its effectiveness and reliability.
A mixed method design research methodology was followed for this research. Data collection was carried out using a literature review, document review, questionnaire, and observation. Maintenance performance indicators (MPIs) were generated from the literature review which were used to formulate the questionnaire and observation checklist. The questionnaire was distributed to 15 participants to evaluate the maintenance strategy used in the observed company. Triangulation was used to address the validity and reliability of the collected data.
The research findings showed that the laboratories in South Africa and locally use mainly corrective and predictive maintenance strategies with Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) starting to gain recognition. The Chemical, Biological, and Forensics (CBF) business unit within the Company A laboratory department uses corrective, preventative, and
predictive maintenance strategies. This maintenance strategy used by the CBF business unit for its laboratory equipment is not effective due to inadequate implementation. Recommendations to improve and properly implement the maintenance strategy such as training senior laboratory technicians to maintain the equipment, having a maintenance service agreement for the major equipment with the supplier, letting the laboratory handle the equipment maintenance, and reviewing of planned maintenance schedule in the management review meeting are made.
The research findings also indicated that the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of the CBF business unit within Company A laboratory department is 90,52 % within the world benchmark of 80 % to 100 % which is acceptable with an overall equipment performance of 94,25%, availability of 94,10 %, and quality at 95,41 %.