Case Study, Pulp & Paper , Carter Holt Harvey
Carter Holt Harvey is the leading supplier of wood panel products, such as MDF and Particleboard, to the Australian market.
A Predictive Maintenance Programme
When the Condition Monitoring team at the former Hokushin owned Starwood Australia MDF panel plant in Bell Bay Tasmania introduced a new predictive maintenance system, the effects on production were remarkable.
As part of a best practice maintenance programme the team replaced the old vibration analysis test equipment with the Commtest VB 2000 to accurately monitor faults and help prevent costly machine breakdowns. In just 16 months from the start of the programme uptime had increased from 65% to 82% and the plant was running more professionally.
The team calculated that the savings returned by the Commtest VB Series amounted to tens of thousands of dollars and weeks of maintenance time saved in identifying faults.
Best Practice, Best Results.
Condition Monitoring Coordinator Kevern Rump joined the old Hokushin MDF panel processing plant in Tasmania in 2001. Formerly called Starwood Australia the green field site was originally designed to produce 200,000m3 of MDF panel per year and operate 24/7 all year round. But, only five years after it was built, the site had been run to the ground.
Quality issues and an unreliable plant resulted in poor uptime, and reduced the site to a 24-hour 5-day operation. With potential closure on the horizon the plant underwent a major re-organisation in early 2001 to bring it back up to scratch. The introduction of best practice maintenance and various departmental initiatives throughout the site saw Starwood recover from being on the brink of closure to a promising investment. And, in December 2002, Carter Holt Harvey purchased the plant.
Product Discussed
vbOnline
Flexible and modular, the vbOnline system is powered by intuitive Ascent software and permanently installed to remotely monitor the health of your critical assets 24/7, automatically alerting you to potential problems.
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