Maintenance Timing Optimization: A Case Of East Africa Portland Cement Company (EAPCC)

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 have been used in other manufacturing organizations. However, the main issue in maintenance policy optimization is in determining the optimal time to carry out a maintenance task. If the task is made too early, the components may not have been utilized to full capacity. If the interval is too long, it reflects too high machine downtime due to unplanned maintenance. The purpose of this research is to determine the optimal time for preventive maintenance that can be utilized at EAPCC in order to minimize the downtime, maximize the availability, minimize the maintenance cost, and maximize the productivity and consequently the profitability of this organization. In order to achieve the objective of the research, a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) was conducted to determine the most critical plant, system and components. Multi-Criterion-Decision-Making (MCDM) was used to determine the most critical plant. The maintenance KPIs that that were used include availability, downtime and number of failures, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR). It was found out that Cement Mill 4, the tuff hopper and the crane were the most critical plants, equipment and component respectively. It was found out that the most optimal PM interval for the critical component is 9 months. To deal with the challenge of high downtime on the critical component, three options were proposed: redesign the tuff hopper, replace the crane and use the tool-box. On the long-term objective, it was found out that replacing the crane and redesigning the tuff hopper have the most attractive Net Present Value (NPV).