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The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities of improving the quality of existing maintenance task of the atomizer of milk powder manufacturing unit of a dairy plant. Looking to the past business volume and expected growth, the milk powder manufacturing unit forms a noticeable sector of processing plant. The lack of quality in maintenance standards leads to reliability losses of about 20–25% with low productivity and profit. Such facts and challenges of keeping the system in ready-state motivate a definite maintenance plan to be modeled based on a live failure analysis to be executed during shutdown or scheduled period.

The deliverables are achieved by collecting the historical failure data i.e. downtime and failure frequencies; from January 2020 to July 2020 at Dudhsagar dairy, Gujarat, India. Reliability modeling is done in a view to understand the failure pattern behavior of the milk powder manufacturing unit. The atomizer is discriminated as a critical component based on these data and their functional failures, failure causes, effects and repercussions of failures with existing control and maintenance practices has been modeled based on live shop-floor study. Scores are assigned on 1 to 10 levels by analyzing attributes effects from lowest to highest concern respectively for every modes of failure through realistic brain-storming among maintenance team by incorporating some advanced attributes like maintainability, economic safety, economic cost and spares with basic criteria in this study. The maintainability criticality index (MCI) is narrated by these score values through multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) based failure analysis models like Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS).

The primary findings of this research work are to propose improvements in the quality of the maintenance plan of critical component like; atomizer of a milk powder manufacturing unit which is commonly representing critical component in a major range of industrial processes. The case study recommended four silent maintenance strategies i.e. scheduled maintenance scheduled discard, scheduled failure finding and redesign as a qualified maintenance plan for the atomizer based on MCI and rankings of its potential failure causes. The results are helpful in upgrading quality standards for the maintenance activities of a process industry of alike or of dissimilar kinds in accordance with the failure analysis.

Originality mainly consists of investigating the scope of enhancing the existing maintenance practices through actual failure analysis with the help of TOPSIS. The criteria employed in this study are probability of chances of failure, degree of detectability and degree of severity as basic criteria along with some advanced criteria like; maintainability, spare parts, economic cost, economic safety are selected based on the outcome of shop-floor study and reliability modeling. The notable past failure statistics (downtime, frequency of failures) of a milk powder manufacturing unit were recorded and these data are analyzed based on reliability to extract an explicative component i.e. atomizer.