Abstract
Reactive maintenance responds quickly to unforeseen breakdowns and depends on emergency
repairs to bring the plant back to operation. The effectiveness of any maintenance planning
strongly depends on the availability of spares, time to repair, and availability of resources (such
as man-power, tools such as fork lifts, cranes, availability of the plant to do the repairs, etc.
necessary to do the work). For any plant that is ageing and designed such that long lead items are
not localised in the country, it is necessary to find sound maintenance strategy methods that can
be implemented to ensure availability and reliability of the running plant. Sound maintenance
strategies are influenced by factors such as reliability of a system, which can be ensured by
condition monitoring through data recorded over the performance of the plant, excellent spares
management processes that include lead time to purchase or to repair, frequency of repairs, and
having the sole supplier for strategic or critical spares, configuration management that allows an
orderly development of any existing systems or sub-systems ensuring that no implementation of
unauthorised modifications and original designs are traceable and documentation is controlled.
The purpose of this dissertation was to provide a reliability strategy that could see the feed
pumps move from reactive maintenance to proactive maintenance to predictive maintenance,
which could ensure availability and efficiency of the pumps.
M.Ing. (Engineering Management)