Productivity Improvement by Maintenance Techniques

Abstract

Currently, manufacturing industry has to contend with marketing mechanism to meet customer 's requirements and compete with the competitors. Manufacturing industry must consider cost reduction by productivity improvement to reduce product unit cost and maintain standard for delivering products to customer on time. This can create confidence to customers beyond the required quality. Especially, the 24 hours continuous production systems which reflects most productive machines utilization and most machine worthily. The objective of this research is to study real causes of Extruder breakdown and improve Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) not lower than 198 hours and Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) not over than 2 hours. This research found 3 main causes that need urgent correction, which were Pump TCU leak, Heat Exchanger leak, and Heat Exchanger obstruct. The correction would follow the policy of continuous production to minimize breakdown time. This study used bypass system both Pump TCU and Heat Exchanger. The improvement was also performed by modifying shaft of the Pump TCU and improving water quality and determining flushing time for Heat Exchanger. Results of the improvement indicate the reduction of MTTR from 5.11 hours to 1.17 hours, the increasing of MTBF from 127.48 hours to 245.99 hours, and the increasing of Equipment availability (Ae) from 95.86% to 99.14%. The improvement had payback period of 3 months and had equipment cost of 55,000 baht and overall cost of 2,502,886 baht.