Sarwan ‘Sal’ Jheeta will hang up his hi-vis and hard hat for the final time at Alcoa’s Kitts Green aluminium manufacturing plant next year. When he does and the shopfloor electrician looks back over a near 40 year career in manufacturing – there will be one moment that stands out.
“It’s really amazing to have been part of it,” he says of the day he and his colleagues went to Manchester and won a Works Management Manufacturing Champions Award for their efforts overhauling the site’s rolling mill. “It’s nice to get something out of it, in a place you’ve worked for so long. I’ll be retiring next year so it’s wonderful to have something to tell the grandkids.”
Eyes will open wide as grandpa, with one hand on the trophy, mimes the dextrous rewiring skills that played their part in ensuring Kitts Green’s thunderous mill can now deliver a 98% improvement in performance. “Hopefully,” says Sal with a twinkle on the prospect of those grandchildren following in his footsteps.
It’s the kind of heart-warming tale that Works Management had hoped to find when we launched the Manufacturing Champions Awards two years ago. For this is an awards set up to celebrate the people whose pride and professionalism power UK manufacturing success and inspire a new generation to seek a career inside the factory gates.
Proven results, an innovative streak, teamwork and an appetite for adding value are fundamental to becoming a Champions winner. And Sal and the Alcoa Rolling Mill Implementation team delivered the box set as they set about upgrading control systems on the mill, which dated back to 1996.
‘If we got it wrong then production would grind to a halt’
“The cheapest replacement system we could have brought in from the outside market was approaching £500,000,”explains Steve Lowes, process capability engineer and managerial lynchpin of the Alcoa team. “We could also see the cascade benefits in terms of throughput and quality of product that would come about by improving the system in house.”
The mill is the beating heart of the Kitts Green plant. In form, it’s akin to a giant pair of rolling pins, stacked one on top of the other. Operators, known colloquially as ‘rollers’, must guide aluminium slabs into the mill via joystick in a control room nestled overhead. The slab is then squeezed into slim-line plate, which will go on to become the precursors of aircraft wings supplied by the Alcoa site.
The old control system conducted a process that was inherently inefficient explains Jheeta. “We had old technology and were using a service contractor who couldn’t get the spares. The mill was optical gauge controlled and when it went wrong it was very hard to interrogate.” Around 25% of product passing though the mill encountered a problem according to internal analysis. The mill was inconsistent in rolling straight and relied on rollers manually intervening to recover product runs.
One pre-project estimate suggested a catastrophic failure on the mill’s antiquated controls could see Kitts Green closed for a week as engineers sought to replace its largely redundant parts. However, a botched attempt to upgrade could leave the plant no better off, according to Lowes. “If we had got things wrong then potentially we break the mill. Do that and pretty quickly production grinds to a halt.”
Armed with a budget of under £50,000 and no margin for error- Lowes began drafting in his dream team for the overhaul. Benchmarking exercises were carried out with Alcoa mills in Russia, Hungry and Italy. Mark Henebury, an expert hot mill electrical engineer at Alcoa’s xxx mill, was flown in from the US. He was joined by some home-grown heroes in the form of Jheeta and fellow electrician Richard Askins, plus process engineer Matt Gregory and system engineers Tony Ellis and Chris Skillen.
“We’re involved in most upgrades, but this one was different” recalls Skillen of the task at hand. “We didn’t have a vendor turning up to site and putting a solution in. We were doing everything in house and the onus was on us as a team to get things absolutely right.”
Unplanned downtime and overspend were identified as immediate red lines. The upgrade would also need to be delivered alongside the day job and that presented an immediate obstacle, according to Lowes. “We all had busy lives and worked in different parts of the factory so at the outset we had to look at how we were going to come together to get this done and done safely.”
The solution came in adopting the Pareto principle of short productive bursts, he adds. “We decided it had to be done in sprints. We prepped, got ready and then we’d aim to spend ten days solid together on the project at the end of the month. That meant that when we were on the project, everyone was totally dedicated.”
Team members limbered up for their first sprint in July 2013 at a lineside meeting board, recalls Lowes. “We had sticky boards determining everything we needed to do,” he says. A Post It with the words ‘keep production running’ featured prominently. “As a failsafe, it was vital we keep the old system operational,” says Askins. “That involved fitting special connectors to allow us to switch between the two control systems- old and new- on the mill.”
The marriage between antiquated analogue systems and modern SCADA and digital PLC controls was always acrimonious, recalls the electrical craftsman. “There was quite a lot of issues with getting old equipment on the mill to communicate with the new,” he says. “There was quite a lot of code we had to write and sometimes we were here to God knows what time to get things working again.”
No egos allowed: the team dynamics that made all the difference
But, the work always felt like a labour of love, adds Jheeta. “It gave us such a great feeling just to be part of it. The team had so many great characters. We were always able to laugh.” The togetherness stems from a long-standing continuous improvement culture on site. Kitts Green quotes a 70% increase in output since 2002 thanks to harnessing the ideas of its factory floor employees. Lowes says: “It’s a very good culture here. It’s common for people of all job functions to work together.”
That ensures overinflated egos find themselves flattened quicker than the plant’s aluminium slabs. “Everybody is treated equally,” says Lowes. “When I approached the guys to form the team, I tried to sell their criticality to the project. Because I’m not an electrical engineer, I’m not going to rewire PLCs. You’ve got to bring the right skills in to be effective.”
And none is more crucial than listening to your customer, he says. A hallmark of the Rolling Mill upgrade was the sight team members springing up the steps to the mill’s control room to garner Rollers’ feedback on any change. Was there an improvement in speed? How did they find the interface on the monitors, which display a live camera feed of each slab’s pass? The constant communication enabled a control system that went above and beyond expectations.
The project entered its second sprint in September 2013 and the team’s meeting board quickly filled with fresh challenges. When the answers weren’t forthcoming, there was always a plan B reveals Lowes. “We’d make a point of going out after work for a curry as a team. Birmingham is famous for its Balti.”
Time out for a Balti is tremendously underrated in team bonding, it seems. “After a long day to go out for a meal just relaxed us,” recalls Matt Gregory, metallurgical process engineer on the team. “You develop a personal rapport with the people and you don’t feel so worried about raising an issue the next day.”
Those tough conversations became the norm as the team installed new hardware and human:machine interfaces in sprints two and three. However, through cool heads and collaboration, the milestones began to tumble. A level one and two control system was perfected in sprint three and four. In total, there were to be five frenetic sprints lasting around a week each in under a year.
By late 2014, the revamped control system was ready to test. In fact, the only thing showing the team’s progress a clean pair of heels were the subsequent KPIs during those trails.
£640,000 bottom line benefit and counting
Throughput increased 20% overnight under the SCADA/PLC based system. Smarter mill controls kicked in to automatically adjust tilt for each pass and took the pressure off operators to manually intervene to ensure a clear pass. It enabled a 98% improvement in the ability of the mill to roll straight.
Lowes says: “The new technology allowed a step change in performance. Taper rolling meant we were no longer having to lose time nosing the front end of slabs. Quick calibration routines brought calibration times down from ten minutes to less than one.” Each benefit brought a domino-like effect. Faster, more efficient, rolling meant reduced cycle times in downstream furnaces that feed aluminium slabs into the mill. Alcoa saved £90,000 in energy costs last year as a result.
A cross functional crew of mangers, engineers and electricians had made good. The mill upgrade was completed on time, to budget and without any extra resources. It’s delivered an estimated £640,000 in added value, rollers love it and Alcoa’s US HQ rank the work as the benchmark within a global group. “The biggest buzz for me is seeing what we’ve achieved- the results,” says Lowes of the legacy. “When I walk past the mill, I’m immensely proud.”
Tenacity, teamwork and talent: it’s amazing what you can achieve with the attributes of a UK Manufacturing Champion. “You know it yourself when you’ve done something good but you don’t always get an accolade for it. To go on and receive the Manufacturing Champions Award just felt like a total endorsement for what we had done,” enthuses Lowes. “I was overcome with pride and emotion when we won. I think people in manufacturing should try to do something amazing and these awards celebrate that.”
Do you have a colleague or site team who has delivered outstanding innovation or added value to a process? Enter you Manufacturing Champions now at www.manufacturing-champions.co.uk