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Plant Strategy – Inventory Support

Siecap is a project management and advisory firm specialising in providing a full range of corporate and operational services across the asset and investment lifecycle which assist our to clients optimise cost, increase performance and manage risk.

To support a new plant maintenance strategy, an inventory strategy was developed to deliver improved asset availability measures and working capital targets

The Background

A contract mining organisation was undertaking the development of a five year plant strategy, that was looking to move from preventive to condition based reliability centred maintenance

The new plant strategy would impact the planned and unplanned maintenance activities and the inbound supply chain requirements needed to be redesigned to support this

In addition, questions had been raised about poor asset utilisation and equipment availability due to undesirable parts planning

How the Siecap team helped

With thousands of storage lines on site, data and processes were analysed, including the work order process and the planning interactions between plant, supply and key suppliers

An assessment framework was developed to investigate process, organisation, systems, lead times and maintenance planning requirements to ensure the correct inventory levels and controlled procedures were developed

The Results

A validated inventory management framework and policy was endorsed by both plant and supply. Decision trees and item criticality were recommended and signed off for each site, as well as business rules and policies for the three key phases of the contract mining operation, start up, operation and phase out of the project / contract life cycle

Asset availability metrics due to waiting parts were improved by 7% and overall inventory working capital was reduced by 12.5%