Reliable Manufacturing helps power up performance for Sembcorp

Online, November 11, 2009 (Newswire.com) - Sembcorp UK is a leading supplier of utilities to UK industry. Its power station at the Wilton International site on Teesside provides steam, power and other utilities to all the other major manufacturing companies on the site.

Seemingly destined for closure in the 1990s, Sembcorp has invested more than £150 million in assets and put the business back on a sound financial footing. However, good business performance has been aided by the ability to supply customers imported steam from a third party utility more profitably than producing it from its own assets. With the third party contract about to an end, Sembcorp recognised that it needed to turn around the performance of its assets to become self sufficient in supplying steam to the Wilton site, or else face an uncertain future. Enter Reliable Manufacturing.

With a combined bottom-up, top-down approach to improvement, and a massive effort by all the staff involved, Sembcorp has made substantial improvements to its operating processes. Following the initial successes of cross-functional action teams, which focused on the elimination of defects in equipment and working practices (including the reduction of boiler downtime by 13 days per annum), the company moved on to larger scale improvement tasks, establishing Reliable Manufacturing's Reliability Model as its underlying core philosophy for tackling performance issues.

Plant performance has been transformed as a result, with coal mill availability on one of the two main steam boilers increasing by over 50% in a year (along with a corresponding reduction in maintenance costs) and overall steam boiler availability increasing by 30%.

Technical Plant Manager Chris Plews, says they are now having success in applying the Reliability Model to Sembcorp's new Biomass plant, commissioned in 2007. "When we saw the effect the process was having on our mature assets we decided to adopt the process on our £64m Biomass plant. Within months we were seeing dramatic improvements and it has helped us achieve record performance from the plant; availability has more than doubled."

The future is looking bright and Sembcorp UK is planning to expand its business by acquiring other major utilities sites in the UK and Europe. Reliable Manufacturing and Sembcorp are looking forward to using this proven improvement strategy to help transform these sites too.