Development Of An Effective Maintenance Concept For Enhancement Of Competitive Advantage: A Case Study Of East African Portland Cement Company

ABSTRACT

Due to global competition, many organizations are coming up with ways of sharpening their competitive edge. This has been achieved through cost leadership, differentiation of goods and services and lastly, through quick response to the needs of the customers. To respond to these market requirements, manufacturers are using high-tech equipment. They are also adopting new material control methods such as Just-In-Time philosophy. Set-up costs are also being minimized to a minimum. All these factors are shifting the focus to maintenance since unreliability and availability of manufacturing equipment will result in high maintenance costs, low profitability, low production and an increase in customer dissatisfaction. At East African Portland Cement Company, the raw mill plant has led to the above problems which in turn lead to negative feedbacks from the customers and as a result, there is need to develop a maintenance concept that will respond to the challenges mentioned above. Consequently, in this research an analysis of various the maintenance concepts were investigated. Overall Equipment Effectiveness of the Raw mill plant was evaluated and analyzed. Downtime analysis was also done to establish the major causes of low plant availability. From the research, it can be deduced that East African Portland Cement Company requires a harmonized maintenance concept regarding inspection, regular maintenance; repair and overhaul, scheduled and preventive maintenance of the main components as well as environmental auditing during operation to ensure that the plant is fully operational and efficient. Total Productive Maintenance concept therefore has been identified as key to the meeting of organizational objectives of the company. A customized framework of Total productive maintenance deployment at East African Portland Cement Company has been developed with six step transformation steps used in embedding high performance culture. It is expected that an implementation of this project will lead to a reduction in failures, time to perform a repair and an elongation in the mean time between failures hence higher plant availability and reliability for improved productivity.