Track: Lean

Abstract

In today’s highly competitive business environment every company thrives to increase its overall production and profit. Maintenance related costs contribute to some of the major expenses related to running a business. In other words, maintenance activities share significant operating costs in an organisation. Reducing maintenance costs without affecting the plant performance improves the profitability of an organisation. Reduction in maintenance costs can be effectively achieved by means of reducing the non-value-added costs and activities involved in the maintenance process. Lean thinking can be incorporated into maintenance activities through application of its principles, practices and tools. In this paper, preventive maintenance activities related to a coal handling plant at a thermal power station are assessed using value stream mapping (VSM) tools in order to identify maintenance wastes and to demonstrate the association between maintenance wastes and the Lean Manufacturing tools. The current state map revealed that non-value adding activities contributed to 16.25% of the total maintenance time. Improving the status quo would see the overall plant availability including the generating plant improve by 0.158%. Although this appears insignificant, the loss in generation due to unavailability of the coal plant has an impact. The power plant generates an average of 90 GWh a year and a 0.158% plant availability will translate to a gain of 142 200kWh annually translating to USD14220 at a cost of USD0.10 per kWh