To keep up with rising global demand in the pharmaceutical industry, UConn's Senior Design students paired with Pfizer's Portable Continuous Miniature Modular (PCMM) facility in Groton, CT to analyze and reduce the scheduled manufacturing maintenance, calibration, and care downtime. Using Pfizer's historical preventative maintenance records, the senior design students are able to assess the efficiency of the existing annual and/or semi-annual maintenance schedule for each piece of equipment. To accurately determine how to modify a maintenance schedule, the team analyzed the health and performance of equipment alongside the measured runtime extracted from Pfizer's database, looking for trends between runtime and recorded wear. Equipment with superfluous maintenance received modified maintenance schedules, while equipment that saw significant wear between maintenance either received shorter spells between maintenance checks or a reevaluation of lubricants, belts, seals, or bearings. With the lack of data for some equipment, the results were inconclusive and will be reevaluated when more data is available.

Our team collaborated with Management & Engineering for Manufacturing 16 on this project.