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Abstract: Maintainability, reliability and serviceability are engineering and management functions spanning the product or service life cycle. It is a characteristic of equipment design, installation and operation, which is expressed in terms of ease and economy of maintenance, reliability of the equipment and safety and accuracy in the performance of maintenance actions. This paper shows industrial examples of a US automotive manufacturer. An overview is given of the plant maintenance and development, with which a sharp increase in the reliability and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) could be achieved through the implementation of numerous activities and initiatives e.g. Total Productive Maintenance, long-term planning, design for maintainability, standardization and partnering, root cause focus, condition monitoring and constant adaption to new equipment.
Keywords: maintainability, reliability, standardization, design for maintainability, condition monitoring, total productive maintenance, OEE, industrial examples
INTRODUCTION
In this study, the automotive plant can be characterised as follows [1]: there has been no downtime since years and the equipment does not pose a stumbling block. Targets for overall equipment effectiveness exceed 90 percent (world class is considered 85 percent) [2,3,4,5]. This has proved achievable and, in some cases, has already been surpassed. Uptime nears 100 percent in some mission-critical areas. Maintenance attention is equally focused on the past, present and future (up to seven years down the line) and reactive work comprises less than five percent of the overall task load in a number of areas. Top management is a big advocate of effective plant maintenance, which is the reason for current state of reliability at the US plant.
The plant located in North America (Figure 1) was constructed in 1993 and opened for full manufacturing in 1994. More than 1,400 of the company's high-end, technologically advanced, customization-heavy vehicles are built here on a daily basis. Inside the plant, the focus is on performance and taking a more stringent approach to reliability. Regardless of what is being operated and what is being tracked, the aim is to achieve
100 percent in terms of performance and reliability. Customers are paying for engineering and quality and do not expect breakdowns on the plant floor. To achieve maintenance and reliability excellence, the drivers are:
» Macro level: Seeking ways that can ensure the equipment is going to be able...