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CAUSES OF MACHINE FAILURE IN THE PRODUCTION PROCESS IN AN INDUSTRY ACASE STUDY OF NEW FOREST COMPANY

CHAPTER ONE

1.0 Introduction

This chapter presents the general introduction of the study with particular focus on the background of the study, statement of the problem, research questions, study objectives, study scope, significance as well as the conceptual framework and the definitions of key concepts.

1.1 Background of the study

After the Second World War, manufacturing industries such as textile, steel and automotive played an important role in the growth of world economy. Western countries were the pioneered in these industries. For example, in 1960, 65% of the world’s industrial production was monopolized by United States and Europe, while in Eastern bloc, manufacturing industries were dominated by Japan and Korea (Rachinger, Rauter, Müller, Vorraber, & Schirgi, 2019).

Today’s business environment has become highly competitive. Manufacturing firms have started recognizing the importance of manufacturing strategy in their businesses. Firms are increasingly facing external pressures to improve customer response time, increase product offerings, manage demand variability and be price competitive. In order to meet these challenges, firms often find themselves in situations with critical shortages of some products and excess inventories of other products. This raises the issue of finding the right balance between cutting costs and maintaining customer responsiveness. Firms are facing internal pressures to increase profitability through improvements in manufacturing efficiency and reductions in operational costs (Buckley, Prewette, Byrd, & Harrison, 2019).

This situation increases the competition among the manufacturers to fulfill the customer’s satisfaction in term of time delivery and quality products. Therefore, it forces the manufacturers to adopt “automation technology”. The advantage of the automation technology is that it increased the productivity with constant quality level. However, the manufacturers have to invest very high cost in term of equipment, components and machines. To reach the targeted rates of return on this high investment, the machines should be fully utilized with minimum cost of stoppage and repair. In reality, machine’s breakdown due to unplanned maintenance (sudden failure) will increase the repair cost and machine downtime (production lost), therefore, this has brought the role of maintenance as an important activity in the manufacturing industries (Subramaniam, Iyer, & Venkatraman, 2019).

Maintenance is defined as the combination of activities to restore the component or machine to a state in which it can perform its designated functions, the application of maintenance started since the First World War for military purposed. At that time, maintenance was applied with the aim to extend the lifetime of military machines such as truck, tank and aircraft. In the industries, maintenance is an important element to achieve the organization goal, which is for successful competition and increase the product quality  (Horváth, & Szabó, 2019).

One of the maintenance strategies is Corrective Maintenance (CM). CM is a traditional strategy that is used to restore the machine or its components to the required function after the machine failed. However, this strategy reflects to high machine downtime (production lost) and maintenance (repair or replacement) costs and One of the alternatives of this strategy is by applying the Preventive Maintenance (PM), (Seregin, Nikitchenko, Kurochkin, Valuev, & Smykov, 2018).

Most of the machines are designed in serial configuration and in many cases of the machine breakdown (failure) are due to unplanned maintenance. Most of the unplanned maintenance is due to component failures. According to  Lu, Liu, Pei, Thai, & Pardalos, (2018) failure of the machine component is influenced by internal and external factors and the classification of these factors.

1.2 Statement of the problem

The Maintenance analysis refers to a process of understanding the failure mechanism and reliability characteristics of the component or machine. It includes the root cause analysis (physical failure analysis) for answering the questions such as why it failed, how failure occurs and what is the failure causes.

Then the logical task such as replacement, repair or inspection is decided. While, the best time to carry out this task is determined by PM models (also known as PM optimization model) such as the inspection model and the replacement model.

The machines at crown beverages have been breaking down and the management of the organization are not aware of what could be the problem it is upon this that this study intends to investigate into the causes of machine failure in an industry.

1.3 General objective of the study

The general objective of the study is to examine the causes of machine break down.

1.4 Specific Objectives

1. To examine the different ways of machine maintenance.
2. To investigate the internal and external factors for machine component failure.

1.5 Research Questions

1. What are the different ways of machine maintenance?
2. What are the internal and external factors for machine component failure?

1.6 Scope of the study

This section will include; the content scope, time scope and geographical scope.

1.6.1 Content Scope

The study scope will include; the different ways of machine maintenance, and the internal and external factors for machine component failure.

1.6.2 Geographical scope

The study will be carried out in a case study of New Forest Company saw mill located in Mubende district.

1.6.3-Time Scope

The study will take a period of 3 months.

1.7 Justification of the study

The study will help in providing information on the different ways of machine maintenance.

The study will also enable the future scholars in having information on internal and external factors for machine component failure.

1.8 Conceptual frame work

MACHINE FAILURE                                                         PRODUCTION PROCESS