TATA Steel UK

  • Company: TATA Steel UK
  • Industry: Process & Manufacturing
  • Services: Asset Management, Condition Monitoring, Lubrication Management
  • Location: Port Talbot, Wales
  • Cost-Saving: Reduced Equipment Downtime

The Overview

TATA Steel UK is one of Europe’s leading strip steel manufacturers with steelmaking facilities located at Port Talbot, Wales, which is capable of producing nearly 5 million tonnes of steel slab per annum. We provided an asset management programme to reduce overall maintenance costs.

The Situation

We currently provide TATA Steel UK with a condition monitoring service to monitor, analyse and report on the condition of all rotational equipment at TATA Steel, Port Talbot, Morfa Coke Ovens (MCO).

The Challenges

The management at TATA Steel were faced with a 43% budget cut and tasked with managing operations safely, but with less resources. The main challenges were to reduce breakdowns, increase visibility of upcoming failures and improve overall equipment uptime.

The Solution

In response to the challenges, we delivered a full suite of Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) solutions to improve overall site reliability. A managed asset management contract was put in place with dedicated service engineers based on site.

The Results

During the contract period, the following results were achieved:

  • Condition Monitoring (CM) routes increased from 100 to 400 assets by utilising the same labour
  • Alignments carried out when new assets are fitted
  • Identified and addressed oil blending issues across site
  • Equipment downtime decreased
  • Routine lubrication of all motor bearings
  • Lubrication survey carried out on all conveyor drum cooper bearings
  • Manual lubrication of rotating components vibration data shows excessive levels due to insufficient grease (see figure 1)
  • MCO planning improved due to accurate our weekly reporting
  • Safety critical failures prevented due to routine condition monitoring, accurate trending and asset knowledge
  • Asset installation testing - reduction in start-up failures/damage
  • Entry of SAP maintenance requests when oil changes required as dictated by oil analysis results
  • IMAD proposal for 'Critical' Turbine and Booster online monitoring tendered
  • IMAD proposal for fixed/wireless sensors for assets
  • Production of KPI figures to track the number of healthy/critical assets

Tata Steel Case Study Figure 1: Excessive vibration levels caused by insufficient grease

Figure 2: Our service engineer collecting data on site