ABSTRACT Risk-based approach in spare part inventory management and plant maintenance is essential for ensuring asset integrity in a process facility. The sugar industry in Kenya has been a victim of inefficient spare part inventory management resulting to unscheduled factory stoppages, factory breakdowns, obsolescence of plant and equipment whose maintenance costs are very high. This has been compounded by high maintenance costs and expensive spares which are also difficult to find and proc...
ABSTRACT The manufacturing sector today faces high competition and there is an increasing demand for customers to receive quality products, at the right time and at a competitive price. This then calls for manufacturing firms to improve productivity more so in automotive manufacturing industry. Master Fabricators Limited had in the past attempted to improve throughput time for the buses manufactured by increasing the number of employees and hiring highly qualified production personnel to ste...
ABSTRACT Good maintenance planning and proper resources scheduling in corn milling industry are of fundamental importance for safe and efficient operation of corn milling plants. This leads to production optimization due to reduced cost of operation. The interactions of aspects of plant safety and reliability with issues related to economic performance, such as production revenues, repair and maintenance costs, renders the problem of managing maintenance and repair activities highly complica...
ABSTRACT Spinning mills in Kenya are operated by eight integrated textile industries to produce cotton yarns for internal use by their knitting and weaving departments and for sale to the local market. Fabric requirement estimated at 225 million square meters cannot be supplied by local domestic production and the gap is met through importation of fabrics and finished garments. Spinning mills play a very significant role in backward integration of the textile value chain by converting fibres...
Productivity of a system is one of the key factors that affects overall competitiveness of an organisation. Productivity is the measure of the effective use of resources which is expressed as the ratio of output to inputs. Therefore productivity is the relationship between result and the time it takes to accomplish them and it is used to examine efficiency and effectiveness of any activity that is conducted in an economy,business or an individual hence it refers to the measure of the efficie...
Abstract Due to intense global competition and increasing demands from stakeholders, companies are striving to improve and optimize their productivity in order to stay competitive. The performance and competitiveness of manufacturing companies is dependent on the reliability and availability of their production facilities. Therefore, it is the objective of the maintenance department to maximize the machine availability. The use of effective maintenance policies is one of the methods that hav...
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 ...
Abstract The basic goal of manufacturing industries is tomaximize profitability in order be competitive and stay in the market. This is mainly achievedby producing products at low cost to maximize profits. However,low productivity has been the major problem facing most manufacturing companies just like DMKL. Two major sections that are affected by low productivity in DMKL processing plant are Labeling and Parking section. Productivity in these sections stand at an average of 50% the rated ca...
ABSTRACT The GP model was developed for production planning in a toothpaste factory. Two objectives were distinguished: minimization of processing cost, and maximization of the capacity utilization of production facilities. Two priority structures were used to explore the trade-off options. When processing cost minimization was assigned the first priority, the utilizations of Processing Plant 1 and Filling Machine 2 were 20.32% and 0.18% respectively. When capacity utilization was assigned fi...
Abstract Grinding is one of the most important fishing operations and it is very useful in our automobile industries. A grinding wheel is made of very small, sharp and hard abrasive particles or grits held together by strong porous bond. The paper presents, a control system for grinding process using neuro -fuzzy technique. The grinding parameters include circurmferentiaI speed of a grinding se ent workpiece velocity and work depth of cut. The maximum grinding temperature is very important ...
ABSTRACT In the manufacturing sector management of the supply chain expenses has been identified as major costs driven problem. For many years, researchers and practitioners have concentrated on the individual processes and entities within the Supply Chain. Recently, however, many companies have realized that important cost savings can be achieved through the reduction of transportation costs throughout their Supply Chain. As companies began realizing the benefits of optimizing transport...
Abstract Energy access plays a crucial role in enhancing the social-economic development among the household members in any nation. Notwithstanding the role of energy access in improving the livelihood of people, provision of energy access has revealed to be a major problem in rural areas of Tanzania. The increased in problem of energy access in rural areas of Tanzania is due to the absence of a unified set of indicators for measuring its energy access in order to improve the livelihood and s...
ABSTRACT This paper presents the operation of centrifugal pumps as turbines for micro hydropower application. Block diagrams are used to present components required from intake chamber to hydropower plant and their electrical energy mechanism for micro hydropower system. A comparison of operational parameters of pump as turbine and conventional turbines is discussed. Also, the paper discusses three types of methods for selecting the centrifugal pump as turbine based on the head, flow rate, r...
Abstract The assignment problem is a special type of linear programming problem which is concerned with allocating to operators (men) to n machines (tasks) given that each operator is qualified for certain of the tasks. The output from each task is given as a function of the number of qualified men assigned to it. The assignment model is to.be solved by conventional linear programming approach or transportation model approach. It is a square matrix, having equal number of rows and columns. ...
ABSTRACT This paper presents a new methodology for weld-metal properties optimization from welding flux ingredients. The methodology integrates statistical design of mixture experiment with mathematical programming optimization technique. The mixture experiment is responsible for the modeling of the weld-metal properties as a function of welding flux levels while mathematical programming optimizes the model. Data and confirmed models from the literature were used to perform optimization on th...