Exploring Factors that Affect Reliability of Open Pit Heavy Mining Dump Trucks: A Case of Bisha Mining Share Company, Eritrea

Achieving high production and productivity target is one of the core focus areas of the mining industry today in order to stay in business. As such, it entails proper performance management of the huge and capital intensive equipment which is utilised in the industry. Dump Trucks are one of the most critical equipment in the movement of material and their reliability has a great influence on the mine output. Unplanned downtime results into undesirable indirect cost of maintenance due to losses in production and the idleness of other machines in the production system. This paper therefore, aims at identifying potential causes of Dump Truck downtime in order to establish a Framework that could be used as a tool by management to proactively identify breakdown causes and make informed decisions. Reliability and Maintainability characteristics; Meantime Between Failure (MTBF) and Meantime To Repair (MTTR) as well as failure mode patterns have been examined in order to identify the key sources of Truck downtime. To help with the research, a case study was conducted at BMSC. Data collection was through document review (time series analysis), questionaires, personal interviews with key subject matter experts as well as through participant observation. Pragmatisim was the philosophical view that underpinned the study with a maltimethods approach. Additionally, a covergent paralle strategy of mixed research methods approach was applied. Qualitative data was analysed through the inductive process of building from the data to broad themes and then proceeding to interpretation. Further, quantitative data was analysed by the use of descriptive statistics from the Likert scale and graphs and tables have been used to highlight trends of data results. The findings from the study show that Maintenance personnel and Truck Operator skills, staffing levels, supervision, the mode of loading trucks and environmental conditions have a significant impact on the reliability of mining Dump Tr