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When discussing the reducing plant downtime and considering increasing metallurgical plant uptime, it is essential to have a clearly understandable definition of the terms 'uptime', availability', 'utilisation' and others. In the example outlined above, the 95% 'utilisation' appears to be achieved after planned and breakdown maintenance downtime has already been subtracted. The true 'utilisation' figure from a cost viewpoint should include the 0% utilisation period during planned maintenance. The overall utilisation figure is the bottom line. For blast and electric arc furnaces, issues of cooling down and the time to get back on line mean that the planned maintenance downtime may be considerable, to minimise the very expensive risk of failure during a run. This is very different to a minerals processing plant, where the overall maintenance hours must be kept to a minimum, as well as minimising the risk of breakdown. Each shutdown must be carefully planned to ensure all required work is carried out, but no unnecessary work. This means condition monitoring, including oil analysis, vibration, temperature, with an excellent record-keeping procedure to enable shutdown planning for hours, manpower resources and spares. The issues for each operation need to be analysed to determine the causes of excessive downtime, for example: insufficient maintenance planning, insufficient condition monitoring, lack of spares or manpower resources, required skills unavailable, equipment reaching the end of useful lifespan. Equally, the reasons for low utilisation of a fully functioning plant require analysis, including lack of feed, lack of product storage, operator training, insufficient operations monitoring, failure of power and water services. Again, the term 'operational downtime' must be clearly defined. If the required resources and understanding of issues are not available within the project or parent company, outside consulting resources may be utilised, but the recommendations of consultants must also be carefully analysed! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/increasing-metallurgical-plant-uptime-consideration-john-visser