Challenge
A processing facility at a large iron ore miner in the Pilbara was struggling to deliver steady state production given some substantial maintenance debt
To meet increasing customer demand the site was also required to rapidly ramp up to 60Mtpa, with the processing facilities being the bottleneck in the entire value chain
It was identified that a lack of structure and management across the shutdown cycle was leading to shutdown over-runs and a poor task completion rate
Solution
Implemented a proven shutdown management framework to provide structure and governance:
mapping clear business processes tailored to the organisation
delivery of tools and templates to standardise and reduce waste
developed shutdown improvement intranet site with links to all required documents and templates creating visible tracking mechanisms for team members and the senior leadership team
roles and responsibilities reset to support the processes
Results
- Improved overall shutdown effectiveness by 20% over a 4 month period (considering HSE, task completion and shutdown duration)
- Re-structured existing shutdown resources to align with the process and increase the shutdown planning horizon from 6 weeks to 12 weeks (with a pathway to get to 18 weeks)
- Combined with the efforts in condition monitoring and engineering, the shutdown management implementation assisted with significantly improving the stability of the plant performance