A case study of investigating reliability and maintainability in a Greek juice bottling medium size enterprise (MSE)

The reliability and maintainability analysis of an automated mechanical equipment of juice bottling industry for a period of forty-five months at machine, workstation and entire line level was made. The descriptive statistics of failure and repair data, the identification of the most important failure modes, and the determination of the theoretical distributions parameters that best fit to failures data was carried out. Furthermore, the reliability, maintainability, failure rate, and repair rate models of the production line for all workstations and the entire production line were developed. The models could prove to be a useful tool both to assess the current conditions and to predict the reliability for upgrading the operations management policies of the production line. It was pointed out that (a) the availability of the juice production line is 85.66% and the efficiency amounts to 82.10% because the equipment’s failures. (b) The WS1 and WS4 display the most frequent failures and the lowest availability with 94.54% and 96.13%, respectively. Moreover, they show the largest number of different failure modes of the production process due to the complexity of the equipment with 28 and 30 different failure modes respectively. (c) In the production line, a failure occurs every 12.5 h or equivalent to two-failures per day approximately, whereas the mean TTR a failure is approximately two hours per failure. (d) The production line for the TTF follows the Weibull distribution, while the TTR follows the lognormal distribution. This particular methodology can also be utilized in the bottling industry sector by the machinery manufacturers and the manufacturers of bottled products to improve the design and operation management of the juice bottling production line.