Cement Energy and Environment

. Maintenance Planning &!Scheduling i~ Indian Ce~ent Industry Deelip Prabhudesai About the author- Deelip Prabhudesai is a physical asset management consultant with over 33 yrs. experience in oil & gas, cement, mining, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and flexible packaging in global companies in India, Europe, Africa and Middle East Region. Working as a senior consultant with leading global asset management consulting groups, Deelip has carried out major maintenance assessments, performance improvement programs, certifications and training courses in maintenance planning and scheduling worldwide saving millions of dollars for the client companies. Deelip can be reached at dprabhudesai@maintcons.in Having carried out maintenance assessment for a leading cement manufacturing company and al: o interacted with maintenance managers of various other cement plants in India, my major observation is that the Indian cement industry continues to operate in a reactive maintenance work culture. Hence it is quite common to see maintenance personnel operating in a fire fighting mode in majority of the plants. Thanks to the reactive maintenance work culture , these plants are not only having high equipment downtime but also suffer from increased maintenance costs, higher spares inventories, quality& safety issues and frequent interdepartmental conflicts . A simple yet most efficient, cost effective and time tested approach to eliminate such problems would be to adopt Effective Maintenance Planning and Scheduling practices. Unfortunately, the cement industry in India hasn't yet fully realized the importance of this simple and easy to implement methodology. While some companies have managed to introduce a few elements of maintenance planning and scheduling in their plants, the quality and effectiveness of the process followed is far from satisfactory. In fact, the concept of planning has been grossly misunderstood. What is being practised by most of such companies in reality is more of scheduling rather than any real planning. Whatever planning and scheduling exists is restricted to Shutdowns and Turnarounds with bulk of the day to day maintenance activities being carried out on reactive basis. Maintenance planning and scheduling is the process of identifying, prioritizing and organizing work so that it can be executed in the most efficient manner. The principle revolves around getting the maintenance jobs done the right way using the right people with right tools, spares, services and information at the right place and time. The term Planning deals with what is to be done and how it is to be done. Planning involves analysis of the work to be performed, sequencing of tasks, methods, drawings & schematics, resource requirements including craft, size of the crew and labour hours, tools, spares, materials, supporting equipment, permits, safety &statutory requirements. Scheduling is who will do the work and when. It is the documented allocation of resources for each of the jobs to be performed in the specific week finalized in close agreement with operations and materials department. Once put in place, effective planning and scheduling process ensures that all the maintenance work except emergency jobs is properly planned, scheduled and coordinated well in advance to facilitate quality execution. 4 -