Cement, Energy and Environment

35 Sample 3 Level Priority System Priority Code Description Criteria P1 EMERGENCY  The work starts immediately and will normally continue nonstop until completed  Work justifies overtime to completion  Immediate health, safety, or environmental risk  Immediate threat to production loss. P2 URGENT  The work may interrupt the weekly maintenance schedule  The work will go through the planning process and will be scheduled to start as soon as possible, but no sooner than 24 hours post notification creation.  The work will not start the same day of notification  Health, safety and environment issues are likely to occur if the work is not undertaken within 7 days  If work not started within 7 days, a loss of production is likely to occur P3 PLANNED  This work goes through proper planning and scheduling process  The work does not interrupt the daily or weekly maintenance schedules  Normal preventive and predictive work is assigned to this priority  Planned production will not be affected.  Health, Safety or Environmental risks shall be safely managed. The priority system should be well publicised and strictly adhered to, once put into practice. The advantage of such a properly defined priority system is that the job requestors stop inflating the work request priorities. The end result is that is a major decrease in emergency and reactive work which ensures proper planning and scheduling of all the other preventive, predictive, corrective, modification etc jobs to be done. The next important step would be to have a six week look ahead planning and scheduling process in place. In such a process, a weekly maintenance schedule for the work to be executed 6 weeks later is developed by the maintenance department in close coordination with operations and materials department. Once the maintenance schedule is agreed upon by the operations and frozen in the weekly planning and scheduling meeting, the planner/supervisor checks the material requirements for each of the work orders. He then raises purchase requests for spares and material not available in stores. Purchase orders are raised by the materials department; material received, checked, kitted and staged against respective work orders 1 to 2 weeks ahead of the work execution week. No job is included in the weekly schedule unless and until all the necessary spares or material are available at hand. The jobs are then executed by the maintenance crew as scheduled. The major advantage of such a system is that the purchase department has a defined list of material and spares to be procured in each week made available to them 5 weeks in advance. This eliminates procurement and storage of unwarranted or extra items, baring the ones required for emergencies and critical equipment. As procurement gets streamlined, material is received as JIT (Just in Time) and consumed accordingly against a fixed maintenance schedule. Such an approach automatically reduces piling up of inventories in stores. The concept of 6 week look ahead planning and scheduling is being widely practiced by leading global asset intensive companies across all sectors to reduce maintenance costs, inventories and machine downtime. It is strongly recommended that the cement companies in India too adopt this simple and cost-effective methodology to reap rich dividend and stay ahead of their competitors. ******