The reduction of downtime in production environments is a simple concept that can yield tremendous returns. An effective system that collects and organises downtime events to increase the visibility and understanding of these occurrences can improve or maintain the competitiveness of mining companies. Such a system often pays for itself in months, or even weeks.
Current high commodity prices represent an opportunity because any productivity improvements have a larger impact on the bottom line. By closely monitoring the equipment, mining companies can better understand the real reasons for slowdowns and stoppages. This understanding also leads to improvements in equipment functionality, operator training, and preventive maintenance, thereby improving manufacturing processes and the organisation's overall financial performance.
One way to achieve this understanding is to develop an information system that tracks each downtime event. Tracking each downtime event allows managers or supervisors to graph equipment performance and evaluate total downtime per shift, product and worker.
Data collection and analysis
Any process improvement needs to have carefully defined goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Once this critical step is properly designed, it is important to automate the collection and calculation of the data and transform it into actionable information. MES solutions, such as Citect's Ampla, help mining companies achieve quick results in reducing downtime by giving them greater and quicker visibility into their operations.
In one mining facility it was taking in excess of 85 hours of effort to collect and analyse information from part of the production environment. Based on the effort the entire area could not be analysed at one time. After Ampla was implemented the data collection and analysis step was reduced to less than 10 minutes for the entire area - a 99,9% reduction in waste or non-value added work from a production output perspective.
The company was conducting continuous improvement meetings to discuss these results every two weeks. Now instead of wasting numerous hours collecting and analysing data, the workers can focus on increasing production.
Simple problems go unmeasured
Another example from this mining company highlights the fact that simple problems are often not given the proper attention. After implementation of a downtime solution at one site of the largest coal producers in the US, the company discovered a simple problem was causing a lot of lost production.
The operators were aware that a loose photo eye on a conveyor was producing many small (in duration) downtime events, but until the system summarised the results no one realised that the loose photo eye was responsible for 25 minutes per day of downtime. In a plant where an hour of production is worth about $20 000 in revenues this simple sensor was responsible for the loss of over $200 000 in revenue per month!
The problem was exceedingly simple - the photo eye had a loose bolt that caused it to get out of alignment resulting in the metal detector tripping the system. The operators would push the photo eye back into alignment and not report the downtime since it was easily remedied.
However, over many shifts the cost of this simple loose bolt multiplied - reducing production numbers considerably. Did the downtime measurement tool expose the operators to a new problem? Not really, but it made clearly measurable the impact this problem was having on downtime and thus production output numbers.
Expensive investments prioritised
Two months after an implementation of Citect Ampla in a coal processing plant it was found that a chute system was causing 15 hours of downtime per month. It was known that the poorly designed system was causing downtime, but until the numbers were accurately and automatically captured over a two month period it was not possible to get approval for a capital expenditure that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but with an effective downtime accounting system the facts were hard to ignore and the redesigned system paid for itself in a few months. An effective downtime accounting system not only highlights these problems it also provides flexible analysis tools that allow operators and managers to analyse data by crew, shift, product or any other variable being collected. In this case Citect Ampla highlighted what the number one cause of downtime was from a Pareto chart display and helped the company prioritise this major expenditure.
Conclusion
Whether the continuous improvement program is a highly centralised, corporate-driven approach or a decentralised, project or issue-driven strategy, an effectively designed and implemented downtime accounting solution will increase the value of the continuous improvement program. The downtime accounting system provides a key tool for collecting large amounts of data and presenting them in a user-friendly fashion that facilitates analysis. In addition, its realtime information enables companies to take proactive decisions that can immediately improve productivity. Lastly, experience has shown that most companies achieve ROI in less than six months, demonstrating that a downtime accounting system will drive improvements without necessitating a long-term investment.
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