Applying preventive and predictive maintenance best practice on plant maintenance

Abstract: Quite often in the industrial environment engineers are required to justify the addition or change of equipment when companies venture into investing in capital to increase production capacity or improve efficiency. Aged and outdated machinery and equipment are at times not economical to re-fabricate due to the improvement in manufacturing methods and obsolescence of old technology. Maintenance of machinery is often not done as it should be to achieve optimum availability where policies don’t exist. Technological improvement has resulted in less robust, advanced and often more complex designs where modern technology replaces older designs making the old designs more expensive to produce in some cases. As a consequence the re-fabrication of old equipment becomes difficult to justify with the high cost. The maintenance cost of previous equipment also does not compare to modern equipment and negatively affects the competitiveness of organisations against their peers that utilize modern methods. The solution to staying competitive is to re-design, upgrade equipment, change maintenance policy or introduce technology. This research will highlight methods that can be utilized to ensure that the reliability and availability of equipment remains at an acceptable level and also show evidence of improvement in reliability of equipment due to re-design and through continuous improvement initiatives at Everite Building Products a manufacturer of fibre cement products.M.Ing. (Engineering Management