Evaluation and reduction of failure losses in production machines through the risk management approach, P. Karuppuwamy, G. Sundaaraj and D. Elangovan
P. KARUPPUWAMY, SRI RAMAKRISHNA ENGINEERING COLLEGE, INDIA
G. SUNDAARAJ, P.S.G. COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY, INDIA
D. ELANGOVAN, KARPAGAM COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, INDIA S R
DOI: 10.47556/B.OUTLOOK2005.3.15
Costs of failures and maintenance of production machines increase the overall operating cost of manufacturing organization and will reduce profit margin. Hence, the management would be interested to minimize the resources allotted to these non-productive activities. A case study wherein the failures of a solder coating machine used in radiator manufacturing are examined. A Reactive Maintenance Model (RMM) is developed in which Risk Management Technique (RMT) is applied to analyze the causes of failures. The loss before and after implementing the RMM is compared using the Taguchi’s loss function in a modified form in which the contribution of material failure and operator failure are expressed explicitly. Appropriate corrective measures are taken to minimize the failures with a practice of suitable preventive maintenance (PM) programme. The outcome of the model implementation shows that there is an appreciable reduction in machine failures with a marginal increase in maintenance cost. In this paper, the concepts of risk management, Taguchi’s loss function, the role of the RMM model in reducing the failures are discussed.
Keywords: Failure; Risk Management; Fault Tree Analysis; Loss Function; Reactive Maintenance.