Cost of maintenance  It's inevitable that every machine can malfunction. However, there are failures that can have very serious repercussions on production, on the machinery itself and unfortunately also injure the operators. Good maintenance can help to significantly reduce these risks and a good practice is to allocate a dedicated maintenance budget annually.  This budget should cover the costs incurred for materials, spare parts, labour and services. Therefore, if proper maintenance is planned and carried out, fewer failures will occur, a better Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) can be achieved and overheads on production costs can be reduced. Production overheads that have to take into account are both the above mentioned maintenance costs, and also the cost of production loss, which in the end is the highest price a process line pays when it is breakdown for a failure. In production lines for commodity production it is estimated that one hour of downtime can cost several t...

5 reasons to embrace digital manufacturing Digital manufacturing is becoming an attractive concept with the development of digital technology. It is uniquely designed for the improvement in operational efficiencies, inventory control, supply chain planning, operations, compliance requirement and industrial internet of things ( IIOT ). Digital manufacturing enhances productivity, consistency, quality, connectivity, and automation intelligence. Additionally, it is efficient in lower manufacturing cost and makes companies competitive. Here we will discuss 5 reasons to transform the industrial operations with digital manufacturing. 1. Improved processes enhance the operational efficiency  Instead of traditional manual processes, it is better to utilize automated and cloud-based solutions that help in streamlining the process flow, performance, decision-making capabilities, cost rework conditions, and performance monitoring. These methods help in improving the quality of servi...

Overall Equipment Effectiveness Overall Equipment Effectiveness OEE is a “best practices” metric that identifies the percentage of planned production time that is truly productive. An OEE score of 100% represents perfect production: manufacturing only good parts, as fast as possible, with no downtime. OEE is useful as both a benchmark and a baseline: - As a benchmark it can be used to compare the performance of a given production asset to industry standards, to similar in-house assets, or to results for different shifts working on the same asset;  - As a baseline it can be used to track progress over time in eliminating waste from a given production asset (leanproduction.com, 2020). OEE is a percentage metric (%) and is calculated by the simple multiplication of three factors: Availability   X   Performance   X   Quality   =   OEE Below we describe and detail every single factor that influences this important pro...

Maintenance The maintenance concept is the comprehensive description of the maintenance constraints, considerations as well as plans to provide support to the operations of the system or equipment in the development process. The concept of maintenance of a system or equipment is derived from the operational concepts and the operation is the major driver in the design and support of the system. Furthermore, the requirements of the maintenance concepts are translated into the support requirements and system design. The maintenance concept continues to come into a form the decisions of the design system, as well as the product support requirements and the detailed maintenance as the activities of the system design, are completed (Waeyenbergh & Pintelon, 2002). At the time of developing the maintenance concept of the system, some important guidelines must be considered which are provided below: The overall general repair policies like the criteria of repair or replacement of equi...