The small to medium-sized manufacturing industry in South Africa is focusing on the wrong things when it comes to the maintenance of physical assets. This is according to Wyhan Jooste, an engineer at physical asset management company Pragma. Jooste was speaking at the Asset Management Thought Leadership conference, attended by 250 asset management practitioners from across the country.
Jooste presented a paper based on a statistical analysis of the maintenance information of 42 Pragma clients from the manufacturing industry. Industries contained in the study include food and beverage; sand, stone and quarrying, motor vehicles and trailers; rubber and plastics; chemicals; paper products; and textiles.
While South African artisans are generally putting in the required number of hours, their efforts are not proving that effective in ensuring asset performance as they are being misapplied. The study found that manufacturers spend 25% of their maintenance effort on preventive maintenance such as usage-based (every 10 000 running hours) and time-based (every three months) techniques. A further 10% is spent on equipment modifications and design improvements that lessen the need for maintenance. The other 65% is spent on reactive maintenance, where the equipment is fixed only once problems occur.
While the preventive and improvement categories are very much in line with international best practice benchmarks, the reactive maintenance component is way too high. There are instances where it makes sense to let equipment run until it breaks down, such as with light bulbs, but the consequences of unexpected breakdowns can at other times be catastrophic to the production process. According to best practice, no more than 25% of the maintenance effort should be devoted to reactive maintenance. This implies that 40% of the maintenance effort in South Africa is currently misdirected. The missing element is predictive maintenance.
Predictive maintenance employs technology to monitor certain equipment characteristics that have been proven to be indicative of imminent equipment failure. Typical examples are vibration and temperature. The benefits are that you don`t run the risk of over-maintaining by replacing parts that could still work fine for a long time, or of having to deal with sudden, unexpected breakdowns. Historically predictive techniques have been very expensive to implement, but new technologies have brought the cost down to levels where smaller manufacturers can now obtain much benefit from it. The problem is that a culture of predictive maintenance has not yet been established within South Africa.
Other conclusions drawn from the study include that not enough effort is made to identify the root causes of equipment failure, most likely due to a lack of appropriate artisan skills. Manufacturers are also not applying information technology diligently to capture and analyse their maintenance data, thereby losing out on a great opportunity for continuous improvement.
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