Improving plant and machinery maintainability.

The maintenance of plant and equipment is costly and can be arduous and hazardous; and yet very little ergonomics attention has been directed to these jobs and, in particular, to designing machines to be safely and speedily maintained. A new maintainability index has been developed and assessed in the UK mining industry. By applying the index the attention of ergonomists and engineers can be focused on those maintenance tasks and ergonomics factors which score high on safety and performance. Improved designs can then be synthesized using the index and assessed for their impact on machine availability. The index can also be used in product selection.