Reliability and maintainability of a forging plant

Manufacturing firms around the world are constantly faced with a challenge to stay competitive in the evolving global market. Majority of manufacturing plants are faced with low production efficiency and productivity challenges. These challenges have triggered the necessity for manufacturing organizations to constantly be on the lookout for improvement strategies. Over the past 10 years, there have been a decline in the South African manufacturing industry in terms of the industry's contribution towards Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This decline may be attributed to different factors such as slow economic growth and lack of investment. However production inefficiency and low productivity are among the contributing factors. This paper intends to investigate effective methods to improve production efficiency by evaluating the efficiency of the production line using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Literature on World Class Manufacturing (WCM) improvement strategies and its applications is reviewed. This paper follows a quantitative research approach based on the case study investigation using the plant secondary data collected from company X. The research uses a case study of a steel manufacturing plant located in Newcastle, Kwa-Zulu Natal to investigate the performance of a production line based on Availability, Performance and Quality described by Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) as prominent Key Performance Indicators (KPI). In addition, the study analyses production stoppages to calculate the three factors of OEE and identifies productivity initiatives that would lead to an overall increase in production line efficiency.