Cork bioengineering firm wins National Maintenance Project Award 2003

摘要

The winner of the National Maintenance Project Award 2003 is DePuy Ireland, part of the Johnson and Jonhson group of companies. The awards are an annual event, co-ordinated by MEETA, the Irish Maintenance Society, with sponsorship from PMI. But this was the first time they were presented since MEETA has become a division within the Institution of Engineers. Timmy Buckley, technical support team leader at DePuy Ireland, led this year's winning project. The project focused on an area of high production downtime and maintenance costs at the orthopedic prosthesis manufacturing facility in Ringaskiddy. The team had first to establish where the priority for action lay, the business advantage to proposed solutions and the overall return on investment. Members undertook training in Six Sigma Process Excellence and defined a project centred on machine availability, analysis and improvement. They made extensive use of design-out maintenance and achieved significant improvements in plant uptime, maintenance corrective time, project management time and standardisation of equipment and spare parts across all four production lines. The payback is expected to be less than one year. Other companies to receive awards included Janssen Pharmaceutical, represented by maintenance manager Jim Kelly; Gypsum Industries, represented by engineering and maintenance manager, Charles Mc Donnell.