Poor Bagging Scale Availability Threatened Production Cuts

Instrumentation engineering root cause analysis of poor bagging scale low availability threatened production cuts.

Article Type:	Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
Category:	Instrumentation
Equipment Type:	Instruments
Author:	S. Raghava Chari

Note: This root cause analysis (RCA) is from real-time scenarios that happened in industries during the tenure of two or three decades ago. These articles will help you to improve your troubleshooting skills and knowledge.

Poor Bagging Scale

Poor bagging scales availabilities: 3 Nos. of scales for filling 50 Kg NPK bags + 1 standby and two for Urea Bagging +1 standby broke down so often that their availabilities were < 30%.

No bulk storage silo forced plant stoppages and enormous production loss.

Author Root Cause Solution

The author found and systematically eliminated root causes are:

1. Ensured all permanently joined parts are fitted up with adequate interferences and mating parts with sufficient clearances and made them strong and robust
2. Simplified the electric circuit, by eliminating a device called ‘pulsa pak’ and a relay to make troubleshooting easy
3. Substituted the flimsy solenoids and limit switches with rugged industrial quality components locally available and housed these in weather and dust tight boxes away from the machines to prevent failed parts from harsh environments and machine vibrations, to reduce failures and to simplify troubleshooting
4. Replaced the complicated bag grips with homemade simple grips
5. Thanks to these improvements availabilities and hence overall production exceeded rated capacities
6. The management was so pleased that they commissioned the author to build 3 machines for the expansion project instead of importing the machines and modifying later. The author built machines cost 35% of imported machines

The above is a very short and oversimplified version. For a complete discussion please consult the Author’s articles on this topic.

Author: S. Raghava Chari

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