A review on effective maintenance strategies and management for optimizing equipment systems

The manufacturing, process, mining, technical, and engineering industries share a common goal of sustainability in delivering the output product. Achieving this goal requires effective maintenance systems with the objective to maintain high reliability for production, high availability, and adequate standards of safety and quality compliance. This paper presents a review of maintenance strategies and analysis of failure data obtained from a metal crushing plant. Downtime data indicates the dominating equipment with failure affecting the system’s availability. The study researches corrective and preventive maintenance strategies with supporting policies such as the Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM), Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM), and Time-Based Maintenance (TBM). This includes failure cause analysis methods and steps for finding the root cause and factors involved. Focus is on the methods applied to optimize performance of equipment and systems, increasing equipment availability, and minimizing maintenance costs. The study further develops quantitative and qualitative analysis using mathematical and statistical modelling tools for failure data. This aids with evaluation and data interpretation when performing analysis. Results obtained indicate reliability parameters with an increasing failure rate over the recorded period. Probability functions depict varying average time between failures on monthly intervals. Weibull functions provide graphical representation of the failure distributions and failure rate. The function also depicts the wear out and constant regions of the distribution.