Title: Reliability, availability and maintainability - RAM analysis of cake production lines: a case study

Authors: Panagiotis Tsarouhas

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

Abstract: In this study reliability, availability and maintainability analysis was conducted for cake production line by applying statistical techniques on failure data. Data collection from the line and their analysis were valid over a long time of seventeen months. The reliability, availability and maintainability analysis of the failure data were determined to provide an estimate of the current operation management and improve the line efficiency. It was found out that: (a) the availability of the cake production line was 95.44% and dropped to 93.15% because the equipment's failures cause an additional production gap in the line (b) the two machines with the most frequent failures and lowest availabilities are the forming/dosing machine, and the wrapping machine (c) the worst maintainability occurs at cooling tower, and at oven (d) the identification of the best distributions for the failure data and their parameters of the cake production line were made.

Keywords: cake production line; reliability; maintainability; performance evaluation; quality; field failure; repair data.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDATS.2018.095214

International Journal of Data Analysis Techniques and Strategies, 2018 Vol.10 No.4, pp.381 - 405

Received: 06 Jul 2016
Accepted: 23 Dec 2016

Published online: 02 Oct 2018 *

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