Balco boosts position in asset management

Vedanta-controlled Bharat Aluminium Company Limited (Balco) has designed a structured approach to achieve its asset management objectives consistently and sustainably over time.

The focuses would be primarily on identifying and controlling risk on internal and external stakeholders and increasing asset life cycle through continuous improvement. The company has been conducting failure mode effect analysis (FMEA) for designing, process and maintenance of equipment that has improved the Plant reliability by 5%.

The company spokesperson said that value stream mapping had been done to identify the non-value added activities (wastes) in system. By elimination of those wastes through lean projects, turnaround time of various activities has been reduced. "Many underperforming systems have been shutdown to improve the plant efficiency and reduce cost," he added.

The machineries based on new technologies like dross processing machine has been installed to reduce the melt loss by 0.3% in the casting process of finished goods. With the six-sigma methodology, projects were identified from the critical areas like Furnace Oil consumption that was reduced making Balco the benchmark. Similarly specific coal consumption in Power Plant has been reduced by 4.3% in one year.

In Augment to its journey, Balco has produced a specialized product for use in Automobile sector. Balco is first in India to produce the grade technically known as AA356.2 alloy Ingot.

The slew of measures has yielded the results.Balco has received certification by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for ISO 55001:2014 (Asset Management System).

ISO 55001:2014 recognizes that effective asset planning enables better decision-making processes to balance costs, risks, opportunities and performance. The ISO 55001 standard elevates asset management to the board level and gets buy-in from the finance community.

Balco, in which Vedanta has acquired 51% stake in 2001, is the 5th in India and 3rd in the Vedanta group to receive the certification.