3-TIERS MAINTENANCE STRATEGY FOR PROCESS EQUIPMENT

In today's world of industries, companies must optimise every possible advantage
to stand side by side with the other competitors. One of the ways is to increase the
production performance while reducing the operational costs. Cost reduction can be
achieved by managing assets where the life cycle of assets comes in hand with the
aim of extending the life of those assets. In order to manage an asset, the maintenance
of an asset must be planned and scheduled. It can be a challenging task where it gives
a critical impact to the performance and overall equipment effectiveness ofthe assets.
In order to optimise the overall equipment effectiveness and the cost of maintenance,
it is important to select the best maintenance policy. However, most companies
consider only one maintenance strategy in real implementation. Most ofthem involve
in quantitative risk assessment which requires a detail data and it only focuses on
particular equipment type. The objective of this study is to develop a qualitative
framework for 3-tiers maintenance strategy that can easily be implemented in the
process plant with respect to their condition and environment for all types of
equipment. In order to achieve this objective, five steps have been developed;
assessing the equipment, assessing its failure, choosing the suitable maintenance
strategies, applying the maintenance strategies chosen and last but not least validation
of the framework developed. A case study has been conducted in polyethylene plant
where all the assets have been evaluated in terms of frequency of failure and severity
of the impact where it covers economic, health, safety and environmental aspect. The
results showed that by implementing this 3-tiers maintenance strategy, there are
improvements in the reliability of equipment. This study will be an aid to the
industries nowadays in implementing the suitable maintenance strategies chosen by
their criticality in order to increase reliability whilst reducing labour workload and
energy consumption.