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

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.