Christophar Chagwedera develops a decision model for choosing whether maintenance of mechanised mining equipment should be performed in-house, outsourced or organised through a mixed strategy.
Turning RAM-C evidence into a sourcing decision
Maintenance sourcing is often treated as a commercial decision, but its consequences appear in reliability, availability, maintainability and cost. Christophar’s model brings those dimensions together in a RAM-C-based scorecard so that alternative sourcing strategies can be compared against a mine’s operational priorities.
The objective is not to prescribe one universal answer. A sourcing arrangement that works for one fleet or site may perform poorly where skills, spares, logistics, production pressure or failure behaviour differ. The model therefore provides a repeatable decision structure that can be populated with case-specific evidence.
Programme journey and progress
Christophar began honours studies in 2021 and refocused the work toward RAMMS in 2022. He completed the honours requirements in 2023 and formally registered for the master’s research in 2024.
By the second quarter of 2026, data collection and the core maintenance-sourcing model were complete and the detailed case study was being finalised. The work is supervised by Johann Wannenburg.