PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE USING RELIABILITY CENTRED MAINTENANCE (RCM): A CASE STUDY OF A FERROCHROME MANUFACTURING COMPANY

High productivity in industry requires high equipment reliability and plant availability. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the management of preventive maintenance by application of the Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM), targeting a ferrochrome processing plant. The research points out that preventive maintenance is often neglected, affecting process continuity, and thus compromising product quality due to drops and fluctuations in operating temperature. These breakdowns tend to be frequent and longer, thus affecting production targets. Start-up failures are also experienced after carrying out maintenance. The maintenance department is affected by the unpredictability of the equipment's operational patterns, and faces challenges in coming up with an effective spare part inventory management regime. This leads to crisis management, thereby increasing the direct cost of maintenance. RCM is used to create a cost-effective preventive maintenance strategy to address the dominant causes of equipment failure. The result is a maintenance programme that focuses scarce economic resources on those items that would cause the most disruption if they were to fail, and thereby increases production.