Cement, Energy and Environment

34 Optimization of Maintenance Inventories in Cement Industry Deelip Prabhudesai A Reliability and Asset Management consultant with extensive experience in leading MNCs in oil & gas, mining, cement, chemicals etc. sector in India, Africa and Middle East region. He is currently engaged as a Business Partner with Kaizen Institute India-Africa. Deelip can be reached at dprabhudesai@kaizen.com One of the biggest challenges faced by cement manufacturing plants in India is high inventory of maintenance spares. In the absence of effective planned maintenance practices, assets continue to fail frequently with the result that the plants are forced to keep wider range of spares in stock. The problem is much severe with companies that have comprised with reliability aspect of the equipment during design and procurement phase for capex reduction. As inventories of spares continue to rise, there is tremendous pressure on the maintenance department from the top management to reduce the same. Consultants are hired as a quick fix solution. However very seldom is any effective and permanent solution found or put into practice that can have a major impact in optimizing inventories. An analysis of the problem would invariably indicate that the root cause lies with the procurement process being not aligned with consumption. In general, the spares procurement as being followed by almost all the units is as under 1. A maintenance work request is raised once the maintenance task is identified. However, in the absence of a clearly defined priority system, every second job is classified as Urgent by the work requestors so as to get the jobs expedited faster. 2. Next the maintenance planner/supervisor identifies the parts required and raises requisition depending upon the availability of these parts in stores. 3. The requisition is approved as per the standard approval process and the materials department starts procuring. However as most of the jobs are categorised as urgent, the person responsible fixes his own priority to source the material. The end result is that important spare parts are often received late as compared to the low priority jobs. Consequently, high priority maintenance jobs are often delayed affecting the health of the assets further. With more and more incidents of equipment breakdowns, reactive work dominates. Preventive and predictive maintenance work is often side lined to take pave way for emergencies and urgent work. This escalates breakdown of machineries further resulting into higher spares requirement and inventories. An effective and time-tested solution for such a problem would be to have a 6 week look ahead maintenance planning and scheduling process supported by a correct maintenance jobs priority system. In such a process, the job priority system performed is correctly defined so that every person in the company is aware how the jobs are prioritized. A typical example of a such a 3level priority system would be to classify jobs as 1) Emergency 2) Urgent and 3) Planned.