Title: Evaluation of maintenance management through the overall equipment effectiveness of a yogurt production line in a medium-sized Italian company

Authors: Panagiotis H. Tsarouhas

Addresses: Department of Supply Chain Management and Logistics, Technological Educational Institute of Central Macedonia, Kanellopoulou 2, 60100 Katerini, Hellas, Greece

Abstract: Due to the competition that has dramatically increased, manufacturers focus on product quality, product delivery time and cost of product. Thus, a company should introduce a quality system to continuously improve and increase both quality and efficiency. Total productive maintenance (TPM) is a methodology that focuses on increasing the availability of existing equipments. The aim of this paper is to study the overall effectiveness equipment (OEE) as a metric for evaluating the progress of TPM of a yogurt production line in a medium-sized Italian company. Data collection from the production line and their analysis were valid for a period of 30 months. It was found out that: a) the overall OEE performance of the line is 92.086% and therefore falls in word-class firms, there is scope for further improvement of the line and especially into the quality rate component; b) the availability of the production line is 97.32%, whereas the maintenance time ratio is 0.02746. Thus, although availability is acceptable, the maintenance time ratio of the line is high and should be optimised with the adequate maintenance policy; c) in the production line there is a failure every 190 minutes that needs about five minutes to repair.

Keywords: performance measures; overall equipment effectiveness; OEE; total productive maintenance; TPM; process evaluation; maintenance management; yogurt production lines; medium-sized enterprises; Italy.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPQM.2015.071504

International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 2015 Vol.16 No.3, pp.298 - 311

Received: 04 Jan 2014
Accepted: 16 Feb 2014
Published online: 31 Aug 2015 *

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