Bonus Workshop#7
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and US Sugar Plant Tour by LCE
Level: Beginner or Intermediate
Case Study 1: U.S. Sugar Manufacturing
U.S.
Sugar Corporation, located in Clewiston, FL, is the largest sugarcane
milling and refining operation in North America. The plant was built in 1932
and has undergone several capacity and modernization expansions, including
the most recent three hundred million dollar “breakthrough” project that has
increased milling productivity to 38,000 tons per day and sugar refining to
13,594,000 Cwt annually thus far. Strategically, the breakthrough project
has enabled U.S. Sugar to consolidate operations and transfer all of its
Bryant facility’s sugarcane volume into the newly expanded Clewiston
operation.
In
October, 2006, U.S. Sugar’s manufacturing team invited Life Cycle
Engineering to conduct a Reliability Excellence (Rx) assessment of their
processes, practices, systems and structures. The findings of the assessment
revealed the following concerns:
·
The milling
operation’s Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) was at roughly 30% asset
utilization
·
Loss tracking
and elimination processes were not established and the plant was performing
primarily between the regressive and reactive states
·
Without a
radical re-engineering of Reliability work processes and achievement of a
proactive Reliability culture sponsored by manufacturing executives, the
facility’s new asset base would inevitably deteriorate to the same condition
of it’s prior assets
Significant improvement has been made through implementation of Rx at the
site since their initial assessment approximately two years ago. Today, the
plant is:
·
Tracking OEE
·
Identifying
all forms of losses and addressing the root causes
·
Operating a
well-trained and well-staffed reliability engineering group
·
Organized
within maintenance to deliver proactive performance
·
Operating a
best practice work management process (reactive work has dropped from 90% to
50%)
·
Addressing
gaps within maintenance technician’s skills
·
Replacing the
silo approach to organizational performance with operational effectiveness
through partnership agreements and a holistic approach to a culture of
Reliability Excellence
·
Exceeding
their unit cost reduction target per Cwt
In
this session, attendees will learn how U.S. Sugar’s Manufacturing Team used
the Rx initiative to:
·
On a Global
basis, design and implement over 40 work processes that define best
practices for their operation in Work Management, Materials Management,
Reliability Engineering and Operational Excellence work streams
·
Use the
principles of “Change Management” to transform their culture from one of a
silo'd approach to work to one of operational excellence across the
organization
·
Establish OEE
as a primary metric for monitoring and driving their operation
·
Develop a
Reliability Engineering function that supports the OEE process to address
and eliminate defects and provide reliable assets through Rx
·
Consolidate
multiple storerooms into a central warehouse based on materials management
best practices
·
Integrate and
aligned new technologies within predictive maintenance with the
re-engineered work processes
Case Study 2: U.S. Sugar Agriculture
The Agriculture Division of US Sugar has four main groups: Farming,
Harvesting, Maintenance and Technical Operations managing four major farm
sites representing a total of 187,000 acres of cane production located in
and around Clewiston, Fl. From this acreage, current annual production of
4.5MM tons of cane is obtained for the Mill at an average production rate of
40 tons per acre (TPA). In addition, there are a number of growers that
support the cane harvest production at approximately 1.5MM tons per year.
Overall cane production / harvesting is largely driven by acres planted and
weather constraints.
Harvesting is performed from October to April and is a 24 hour, 7 day per
week operation. The harvest schedule is based on maturity of the cane by
blocks and farms and that which is available from contract fields.
Harvesting operations is mostly internal utilizing migrant harvest workers
that largely return each year to complete the harvest. A typical harvest
crew is made up of 15 people. There are typically five mechanical harvester
machines assigned to each crew with various support equipment such as
tractors, wagons, trucks, etc. The tractors / wagons / trucks carry the cut
cane from the fields to the elevator stations and load the railcars.
Railcars are then delivered to the Mill for unloading and cane processing.
In February, 2007, the Agricultural Division of US Sugar requested that Life
Cycle Engineering perform an assessment of their operation, just as was done
in the Manufacturing Division. This assessment revealed that they were in
the reactive range in terms of their approach to Reliability Excellence and
highlighted the following opportunities:
·
OEE was non-existent as a managing metric for the Division and data needed
to manage reliability was extremely difficult to obtain
·
Maintenance work was limited to PM’s and emergency work
·
Operator Care for harvesters and farm production equipment was minimal
·
Major equipment such as irrigation pumps and product elevators were in a
regressive state with no formal plan for restoration
In
this session, attendees will learn how U.S. Sugar’s Agricultural Team used
the Rx initiative to:
·
Participate
in the Global design of Rx work processes that define best practices for
their operation in Work Management, Materials Management, Reliability
Engineering and Operational Excellence work streams
·
Apply Rx best
practices to a farming environment and culture
·
Measure OEE
in the mechanical harvesting operation and apply RCM principles to the
harvester machine as a system
·
Establish the
ability to compare their operation to international benchmarks
·
Determine
that a 5% OEE improvement equates to $4.0M savings per year
·
Institutionalize Loss Production Tracking and a reporting system for
monitoring critical metrics
·
Improve
availability by25% through fleet reduction and still hit production targets
·
Integrate
their work processes with new technology and use available data to support
elimination of one harvest unit shift from the field
Plant Tour
This
plant tour will highlight both the sugar harvesting and manufacturing
processes addressed during the implementation of Rx and discussed in the
case studies presented earlier.
The
US Sugar Manufacturing and Agriculture Divisions are located in the central
area of the state in Clewiston, FL. The tour will include transportation
from the IMC to the plant site and back. Along the route, you will see
thousands of acres of sugarcane fields that are currently in various stages
of harvesting, including a look at the equipment used in harvesting. This is
the beginning of the sugar making process. The tour will continue to the
manufacturing site where you will follow the sugarcane billets from the
harvesters to the unloading and milling operation. In this operation, the
cane is shredded and passed through multiple tandem rolls used to squeeze
the raw sugar juice out of the fiber. The remaining fiber, called “bagasse”,
is stored or sent to the boilers as fuel to generate the steam and
electricity used in sugar processing. The raw juice is then passed through
evaporators and crystallized in the Boiling House operation into “raw
sugar”. The raw sugar is then sent to either the Refinery where it is
processed into sugar products or to a raw sugar warehouse to be stored and
process through the Refinery during the off crop season. The final products
from US Sugar are refined (white) sugar in various packaging forms, liquid
sugar and finally molasses as a by-product.
You will come away from this tour with a deep appreciation of the overall
sugar manufacturing process and the Reliability work processes required to
sustain the operation.
In
this 1-day workshop, you will learn what a successful application of OEE
looks like at U.S. Sugar in both their manufacturing and agriculture
processes. You will learn
whether or not your organization has the right metrics
in place to understand where and when losses are occurring that effect your
ability to operate effectively. You will see how OEE, when used correctly,
measures the three critical indicators of production system performance,
e.g. availability, production rate and quality rate, and can be used to
quantify the performance of each manufacturing module, as well as the entire
site.
Participants will come away from this session reviewing and discussing the
success attained by U.S. Sugar with the ability to better promote the
business case for reliability for their own organization’s success.
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