The Challenge

The client, who is a global mining giant with diversified interests in various commodities across South Africa, had been experience unplanned bearing failures on its horizontal grinding mills.
Consequently, production efficiencies were down, affecting its revenue generation capacity.

The client needed the services of a consultant to conduct a thorough review of the causes of unplanned downtime and develop measures to identifying impending failures in advance.

The Solution

Site visits were conducted to assess the on-site operating conditions and to look at the milling system configuration and critical components.

Following a lubricant sample analysis, a review of the system design revealed opportunities to improve several areas such as:

• both the drive and non-drive end sealing arrangements with a more rugged design to stop contamination ingress
• Contract negotiation strategies and levers for engaging the OEMs were developed for the mine for negotiations with the relevant OEMs
• Base plate flatness tolerances

Analysed and recommended an appropriate lubricant for the heavy-loaded application. A maintenance manual was developed with recommended maintenance frequencies and inclusion of sensors for collection of vibration, temperature and other relevant data for machine health monitoring and predictive analytics

Results

Key notable results included:

• 15% savings opportunities identified
• Contract negotiation strategies and levers for engaging the OEMs were developed for the mine for negotiations with the relevant OEMs
• Recommendations were provided on maintenance and inventory management best practices to lower
1. Unplanned downtime
2. MRO spares cost through a criticality linkage framework
3. High purchase of non-core vehicles (fit-form-function)