Abstract
Maintenance used to be considered a necessary evil, however, manufacturing has become more reliant on machines than human resources. Now, leading manufacturing companies are employing maintenance strategies as a means of gaining a competitive advantage. Good maintenance strategies do not only allow a company to reduce its maintenance bill but to produce its products more efficiently and effectively. This is achieved by increasing the equipment availability and reliability, which not only leads to increased output but also better planning.
In the past, the only available strategy was reactive maintenance (RM), where equipment was repaired after it failed. Modern strategies range from preventative maintenance (PM) to total production maintenance (TPM). In PM, components or assets are maintained before they fail. This is achieved by doing maintenance on a predetermined schedule depending on equipment age or operation or by monitoring the equipment using condition monitoring and feedback to plan maintenance tasks.
The two most recent strategies are TPM and reliability-centred maintenance (RCM). TPM focuses on getting everyone in the organisation involved in plant maintenance. This strategy ensures that maintenance is decentralised, hence increasing the overall maintenance capacity without hiring or renting extra resources. RCM is a more technical strategy that utilises science to select maintenance tasks and tactics. This strategy is tedious and expensive to implement but it has been known to improve maintenance performance.
From the research, it was established that the company needs to improve the way it captures its maintenance and delay data to ensure that the data is more usable. Currently, the data contains a lot of noise and will require a lot of effort to remove. Results from the analysis indicate that the company does not use aggressive maintenance strategies, such as RCM and TPM.