Using Reliability Centered Maintenance to Reduce Operational Cost of Heat Exchanger and Feed Water Pump in a Brewery

In this research, reliability-centered-maintenance (RCM) was applied to reduce the operational cost of heat exchanger and feed water pump in a brewery. The feed water pump and heat exchanger system were selected for RCM analysis as they both have significant impacts on the quantity and quality of the beer produced in the brewery. The failure mode effects and criticality analysis (FMECA) of the production systems were examined, and a maintenance task was developed for the systems. The exponential reliability method was employed to analyse the failure data collected from the maintenance logbook and records to determine the reliability of their feed water pump and heat exchanger systems for operational cost efficiency. Broad based results showed that the RCM had great impact on the preventive maintenance (PM) tasks. The Run-To- Failure (RTF) frequency was reduced. The result showed that by carrying out the proposed RCM labour plan- the labour cost decreased from N108, 000, 000.00/year to N67, 200, 000.00/year with the proposed PM task. The results showed that about 36.19% of the annual spare parts cost are saved when proposed PM planning is adopted other than the current maintenance (RTF) plan. The maintenance program applied in this study could be adopted by production firms to improve upon the reliability and operational cost of their production equipment.