Selection of Maintenance Strategies using DMG

Globalization is increasing the level of market competition and companies are reviewing every aspect of their business to gain a sustainable competitive edge. Maintenance is one of the aspects gaining more attention. This is not true for developing countries as maintenance is still considered a necessary evil and is only done when there is a breakdown with little to no planning. Due to this reason, a significant amount of money and time is wasted doing tasks that do not improve the condition of the plant. Good maintenance strategies improve plant availability and reliability. The current research proposes the use of decision-making grid (DMG) to select maintenance strategies. We used DMG to select maintenance strategies in a ferrochrome plant and found that there were opportunities to use more aggressive maintenance strategies as this will enable plant technicians to focus on core maintenance activities and give production personnel an opportunity to fix simple plant breakdowns reducing downtimes. It was also noted that data capturing needed attention for the ferrochrome to be able to use available data to make more informed decisions.