Sustainable Equipment Maintenance Framework for Small-Scale Water Production Plant

Abstract

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is still much felt in the global economy: many companies are struggling to remain competitive in business, and thus the sustainability of productions ranks high amongst research topics in manufacturing industries. While much research had focused on large scale companies, the least attention had been paid to the small and medium-scale manufacturing industries which happen to be amongst the worst hit. This paper develops a model to support maintenance decision-making in a small and medium enterprises based on AHP. A total of 8 sachet water SMEs that met the inclusive criteria were selected. Six criteria were identified; consequences of failure, Ease of repair, Downtime, Frequency of failure, Cost of repair, and Cost of replacement and considered in the pair-wise comparative analysis. The developed model is targeted at addressing the fact that different components of the production equipment have disparate need for maintenance at any given maintenance schedule. Given that resources are often limited, it is cost-effective that choices of maintenance location be made such that the value added by the maintenance activities is optimized. The highlight of the analysis is the derivation of the Maintenance Significant Factor (MSF) that reflects the maintenance location-specific values of components. The result showed that the Submersible pump at an MSF value of 0.698 should attract the utmost priority and be closely followed by the Automatic Production Machine and Modules at MSF of 0.555 and 0.447 respectively.