Optimizing plant's maintenance cost using strategic switching approach

Inadequate supply of public electricity in Nigeria has affected the productivity of many manufacturing industries. Electric generating plant is being used as a standby supplement to public electricity at outage hours. The high cost of running and maintenance of this generating plant has adversely affected the sustainability of the industry. A maintenance strategic switching approach was developed to minimize the cost of running the electric generating plant in the industries. Maintenance strategic switching and cost control parameters are preventive, repair/corrective and replacement. The maintenance cycle for each of the components served as tool for the determination of cumulative sum of maintenance cost from which the minimum cost schedule was selected. Data collected on power machinery from a water generating company was used to test the model. The least probability of failure (non-progressive deterioration) for components was recommended for adoption. There was a significant saving in maintenance cost of components under the non-progressive deterioration. In the 750 schedule, while the cost of maintenance with progressive deterioration was N149, 677, that of non-progressive, least failure probability was N75, 960.35 with savings of 49.25% over the former. Therefore, most economic schedule was 750 cycles. This scheme predicted for the organization the optimal maintenance strategy to utilize.