Cement Manufacturing Company in Ireland †Myassignmenthelp.com

Question: Explain On Cement Manufacturing Company in Ireland? Answer: Introduction: The current report is about an interview the maintenance manager of a cement manufacturing company in Ireland. The report is based on the telephonic interview (Skype) conducted with an objective to gather to gather industrial information from the person and based on the information collected a report is drafted including all the salient issues related to the organizational functionality and maintenance planning. The plant where the current maintenance manager communicated with a cement manufacturing company located in Northern Ireland. The plant is quite big and has capacity of about 0.75MT per annum. There are diverse building materials in the cement domain are being manufactured from the plant and the following is the list of the same. When it comes to the product varieties most of the cement being manufactured in the organization will be marketed in the form of bulk cement, which will be taken away from the plan in the form of custom designed trucks. Another important outlet for t he cement from the plant is in the form of packaged cement. Packaged cement will be carried away from the plant in the form of packages and will be further subjected to whole sale and retail marketing through dealers and other marketing network nodal points. Specialty cement is a particular cement which has is both the white cement and calcium aluminate cement. Both these cements are meant for specialist applications and they will be used for such requirements. Other non-cement products like Ground granulated Blast- furnace slag (GGBS) and Fly ash are also being manufactured in the plant for the sake of construction industry applications. As a whole the plant products are being employed in several countries in Europe apart from indigenous usage in Ireland construction industry. It is one of the dominant manufacturer in cement manufacturing companies in Ireland and belong to the world poplar Lafarge-Holcim Group of cement manufacturers. The following is the essence of the interview c onducted and the summary observations are presented in a suitable format as given below, The person interview is one of the maintenance managers of the organization and he is directly responsible for managing about 23 staff in total. Out of the total 23 staff there are about 5 maintenance engineers 7 maintenance supervisors and about 11 casual labor and General workers. He is responsible for the central maintenance operations and is directly responsible for the Vertical roller mill and the Rotary kiln operations. The entire maintenance operations of the Rotary kiln and the Vertical Roller mills employed in the organization are being planned and managed by this team under his supervision (Upasani 2014). The maintenance operations are well designed and being implemented in almost all the companies in the group. KPI (Key performance Indicators) are designed with an objective to improve the overall performance of the plant and they will be used as reference to understand the trend in the organization. Essentially KPIs will formulate a framework to take right steps to further improve the operational performance of the organization. They will be formulated to visualize the overall vision and the mission of the maintenance department of the organization. Ideally the process of formulating the KPIs consist in collection of maintenance data from different divisions of the organization from the statistical reports prepared through the software applications installed in the maintenance department computers. All these computer units are net connected and will record the maintenance planning, the record of the maintenance operations, record the details of the time, equipment usage etc. in the m aintenance operation. The complete information from the maintenance operation is recorded and it will be presented in the form of KPIs for further analysis (Palmer 2014). The following are two areas where the KPIs are used to track the organizational performance, OEE and Equipment Reliability Inventory and Stores management OEE and Equipment Reliability consist in evaluation of the performance of original equipment as well as the reliability of the equipment in general. The following are the KPIs employed in this regard, KPI Mean time between Failures The average time between two failures of the equipment is expected to increase with time At present the VRM (vertical roller mill) - Mean time between two failures is planned to increase by 10% for every year. KPI - % Emergency work Out of total maintenance time, the time required to be invested for the control of the emergency down time of the equipment is the issue measured with this KPI. % Emergency work is expected to be less than 10% of the total maintenance time. This speaks of the reliability of the equipment. Inventory and stores management is another domain that relates the company sales and marketing operations and the results of the analysis of the KPIs in this section can be utilized for organizational production planning as well. Some of the KPIS like lead time can also provide an insight into the supply chain operations and their efficiency and this in-turn will provide further focus on the organizational operations. The following are few KPIs being employed by the current organization to control its inventory and stores management operations (Palmer 1999). KPI Inventory turnover This KPI will be computed based on the statistics of the warehouse, the actual sales in the given time divided by the stores capacity will provide the number of times the inventory turnover has occurred in the given time in the organization. This infact will provide an estimate to compute the actual stores capacity and will provide an insight towards the actual sales trends as well as the need for the production capacity planning. The current ware house has inventory turnover of 2.5 in the time duration of 30 days and is increasing at the rate of 5% every year. KPI Lead time It is an indicator designed to find the performance of the supply chain operations in the organization. There is particular reference to the time it takes for the organization to recollect the goods and the material is the actual term measured by Lead time. KPI of lead time should not be too high this should be in accordance with the production planning procedures. At present the lead time for getting Hammers for EV240 crusher employed in the organization is 25 days. ATOX make vertical roller mill is being used in the cement making production line in the current organization. Since the load on the equipment is quite high and is very essential for the process to happen, Vertical roller mill operation is quite critical for the organizational functionality. The maintenance operations of VRM will be scheduled in accordance with the maintenance plan suggested by ATOX. During the preventive maintenance operations all the maintenance operations will be conducted with the suggested equipment and the details of the findings from the range of equipment will be recorded in the online log records. Also there will be back up recorded on the log books. For example the following is the log record of the bearing of the VRM (Wentz 2014) Maintenance Log: (Online) Online there will be record of the maintenance operations in software as well. The record of the events will be made on the software in the proforma almost as shown above. Statistical results: Typical results like yearly lubrications conducted in the bearings. The number of times the bearings are changed. The total down time of the component due to the failure in emergency breakdowns and the total down time of the equipment due to the preventive maintenance operations etc. will be calculated and shown in the records. Remarks: In the current organization a system wide plant maintenance software is being used and there happens accumulation of data from the entries made in the software periodically and based on the outputs and the results obtained there will be decisions taken out for further maintenance of the equipment. 4) Maintenance Crew Structure and operations: Maintenance crew of the organization are divided in planning, scheduling and execution teams. The planning team and the scheduling team will be situated in the central maintenance office and they are instrumental in planning the maintenance operations of the total equipment in the organization. Day to day schedules and the plans of the maintenance operations will be prepared in accordance with the manufacturers specifications and will be supplied to the maintenance engineers of the execution team. Planning and scheduling teams will work only in one shift. Execution teams will work in three shifts a day, in accordance to the production process and in accordance with the resources availability any shift can be assigned of the duty to perform the maintenance work. There will be three different execution teams in the organization, each working in a different shift. Apart from the actual scheduled maintenance work, there will also be a team working for taking of the unscheduled and emerge ncy maintenance activities. Unscheduled and emergency maintenance activities can happen at any time and there will be centralized maintenance co-ordination team taking care of these activities. In case of emergency the task can be assigned to the execution team or special teams can be made from the staff present in on call duty at any time. Generally each maintenance team will be managed by one senior maintenance engineer, two to three junior engineers and around 5 supervisors and general staff in accordance with the requirements of the job (Peters 2014). 5) Maintenance planning in the organization occur in three simultaneous phases, planned and scheduled, unscheduled or emergency and predictive maintenance. Scheduled planning will be done in accordance to the equipment maintenance requirements. Based on the information and data collected from the technical manuals there will be exhaustive preparation of the year round maintenance schedules, And each schedule will be prepared using custom software available in the organization that make use of the resources like manpower, personnel etc. once the entire planning is done, the scheduling of the maintenance activities will be performed and the reports of the same can be generated with the assignment of the particular maintenance staffs along with work orders mentioning the time and associated requisition forms to collect the material from the stores and tool rooms. Once the entire process is complete the maintenance planning will be executed by the respective teams. Unscheduled maintenanc e will be planned as per the need that arise at any time and will be planned as per the priority and resources availability. Generally special provisions will be made in place to face unscheduled maintenance operations. Predictive maintenance is another important key functionality that can happen any time around the year and will be based on continuous systems monitoring and observation (Palmer 1999). 6) The resources to the execution teams will be allocated by the central planning organization. Apart from few permanent resources that rest with the execution teams, most of the consumables and other required resources will be collected by the execution team members from the tool rooms and warehouses from time to time in accordance with the work orders issues to them by the planning division (Reza 2016). 7) The maintenance crew performance will be assessed based on the completed work orders and registered in the system. The statistics like the total down time consumed, the repetition of the trouble from the specific job, the number of times the particular job is under maintenance etc. will be collected and based on the analysis of these facts the maintenance crew operational performance is estimated(Roda 2014). 8) Organization at present is using Enterprise Resources planning software to manage the organizational level plant maintenance operations. Plant maintenance management software will utilize all the operations of the plant and will work for customizing the maintenance planning in accordance with the requirements from time to time (Khan 2003). 9) SMED is the process where in the jobs will be managed and will be changed on the job centers with an objective to minimize the set-up times. The process consist in minimizing the set-up time. There is no much scope to use the technique in the process line. However in the work-shop used for making small size components for supporting transmission system operations SMED process is used. Timer Pro software and techniques are employed to study the change process using Pareto and custom developed methods are developed for better operational feasibility (Aghezzaf 2007). 10) TPM or total production maintenance is the holistic approach of the organization which will be used by the organization to enhance the equipment performance and operation with maximum efficiency (Xiang 2014). TPM is one of the philosophical concerns of the organization. Both 5S and focus on availability, performance, quality and OEE are employed in the organization for the sake of improving TPM (Liu 2004). 11) Number of Destructive and Nondestructive methods are used for the condition monitoring of the equipment. For example ultra sound and acoustic methods are employed for analyzing the bearing conditions. Oil analysis employed to find the condition of the lubricating components (Ben 2016). 12) Manufacturer catalogue of suggestive maintenance operations will be collected, they will be analyzed on the time framework and a cumulative schedule will be prepared to consolidate the maintenance plan of the equipment. Once the maintenance plan is complete it will be executed. However for making the schedule and planning resources availability will be inspected (Lyonnet 2013). 13) PMs are revised occasionally based on condition monitoring and results noticed from there in. Also installation of new parts different from the original equipment manufacturers insist the usage of different PM plans from the actual devised in the system (Yildrium 2014). 14) FMEA is used to analyze the failure mode and causes. In current organization there are several situations being tested with FMEA procedures for example bearings failure in the VRM are often worked to analyze the bearing failure trends and analysis (Wang 2015). 15) Energy consumption cost of captive power plant (Generator working with Diesel fuel) worked on to reduce by improving the operational performance. Special servicing installation of new engine components, removing internal fillings etc. often performed to enhance the performance of the generators (Ahmadi 2017). 16) RCA is encouraged in maintenance teams. Generally RCA will be performed at managerial and supervisory levels based on the information and data collected for the analysis of the routine maintenance activities. The information collected will be analyzed and evaluated of the basic reasons of failure (Verbert 2017). 17) CMMS of Cworks is being used at the workshops and distributed maintenance operations. However central planning is mostly done on the ERP-PM module (Hosking 2014). 18) Quality checkup division of the procurement section will typically checks the integrity of the intake material used in the organization for new installations (Upasani 2017). Yes, consignment stocking of parts is used (Palmer 2014). Minimum inventory levels for the spares will be determined based on the yearly usage trends and maintenance records (Singh 2014). CMMS and ERP-PM software will generate the spare requirement orders based on the work orders and the maintenance record statistics. Yes, inventory turnovers are formally measured and KPIs are developed to take up further decisions. Ballmark figure of spend on sales will be about $2 million every year. 20) Rather than skill I can say the commitment, hard-work and dedication will make the difference and will contribute for the performance of the job well. Recommendations Since the organization is following solid maintenance plan and execution as such there are no any specific remarks that can be provided. However I wish the planning and execution in the organization can be decentralized. Particularly the operations on the key equipment like kiln, VRM and CCS should be separated from the maintenance of the support equipment like conveyor belts, other transmission units like belts etc. This will contribute to the capacity build up of the skills of the people. Also there is need to have more execution teams in the plant. Apart from that Lafarge is truly performing world class operations in maintenance. I make recommendations to have a separate RD for the maintenance activities of the plant with particular focus on the RCA(Root cause Analysis) and KPI improvements. Conclusion: The current report is a comprehensive coverage of the interview of diverse issues in the plant from the maintenance manager. 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