FACTORY RELIABILITY IMPROVEMENT THROUGH DOWNTIME MONITORING AND DEFECT ELIMINATION

RESEARCH has shown that the major gains in the reduction of factory downtime come from reliability engineering rather than from just improving maintenance practices. In particular, a focus on defect elimination is essential in order to improve plant reliability and factory uptime. In 2004, Mackay Sugar implemented a Citect Ampla Downtime monitoring system in order to better record and analyse plant downtime. In conjunction with the Asset Management Group (AMG) from Transfield Services, Mackay Sugar also introduced a program of undertaking Root Cause Analysis (RCA) investigations on all major plant failures. The outcomes of the RCA investigations resulted in actions to revise the maintenance strategy or policy for that failure mode or where appropriate, to eliminate the defect by other means such as redesign. This paper describes the issues which were addressed during the roll-out of this initiative. It concludes by discussing the results obtained with factory plant availability through the use of this methodology over the past six seasons.