The Mill Way Forward team is making major steps to improve mill reliability and eliminate downtime.
The Round Mountain mill struggled with effective utilization in late 2012. Much of the downtime was the result of an unusually cold winter that left many areas frozen, quite often leading to an inoperable condition. The Round Mountain mill maintenance and operations team wanted this to improve.
In January 2013, a cross functional team was formed to focus on mill reliability. The mill’s uptime needed to improve to ensure production targets could be achieved. Once the Mill Way Forward (MWF) team was established, issues were discussed in an open forum with actions assigned and followed up on by the CI facilitator. The team focused on improving their ability to run the mill during cold weather. The team also methodically went through many of the processes involved in the overall milling circuit, and identified pumps, pipes, tanks, screens, valves and other areas that could possibly fail and cause unplanned downtime.
Now over one year later, mill reliability has improved significantly at Round Mountain. The mill had no downtime for cold-related events this past winter. However, there are still unplanned downtime events. This is the ongoing challenge for the MWF team who continue to meet and strive for optimum reliability.
As Round Mountain’s second Way Forward team, the MWF team was the first to adopt the moniker “Way Forward” now used to describe the multi-departmental teams.
The Round Mountain mill.
