Antoine Snyman
INTRODUCTION
Even though the demand for the platinum
group metals (PGM) grew roughly 10 times over the last 40 years, the price
remained the stable. Due to this,
organisations in the PGM sector are faced with the challenge to produce more
with their existing resources and engineering assets. Naturally these organisations respond with
cost reduction; a focus which may have a severely negative impact on the
organisation’s performance (Pretorius, 2004) and focus should rather be placed on asset management; however, very
few organisations operating in the primary processing stages of the PGM sector
pay attention to the measurement of utilisation and performance of assets.
The objective of this article is to present
a model based on the principles Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) to
suggest how asset performance can be measured in a continuous process (specifically
concentrators) in the PGM sector of a major mining house in South Africa. The model can be applied to any continuous
process.