Face-to-Face: Ashish A Gupta

Ashish A Gupta is a Mechanical Engineer from Bangalore University and certified as Chartered Engineer by Institute of Engineers, Calcutta. He has 30 years of experience in industrial project management, operation & maintenance of paper machines & captive power plants and multinational logistics including significant handson experience in Instrumentation, Electrical & Civil engineering departments in Paper/ Paperboard and Power projects. Currently, he is serving Emami Paper Mills Ltd. as Sr. Vice President- Technical and Manufacturing head.

With over 25 years of experience helping businesses to find comprehensive solutions, Emami Paper Mills Ltd. enjoys the position of being the largest manufacturer of Newsprint in India, and the only manufacturer in Eastern India and manufacturer of Multi-Layer Coated Board. With over 22,000 newspapers, of which 1800 are dailies, its media market is the second largest in the world. In a discussion with Machinery Lubrication India, Mr. Ashish A Gupta – Sr. Vice President, Emami Paper Mills Ltd. tells about their journey of Lubrication Excellence

What is the importance of equipment reliability in paper industry?

Equipment reliability is the most important element that contributes towards achieving the targeted production. It becomes even more important in higher capacity machines because their down-time costs are higher. Better equipment reliability also helps in keeping your maintenance budget (spares cost and manpower cost) lower. It also helps in keeping the cost of downtime lower, which is the major component towards reducing proftability of any operation. Having recognised the importance of reliability, we have invested in a structured reliability program covering lubrication and other tools like of CBM (condition-based monitoring) e.g. on-line vibration monitoring systems on our (critical) high speed machines.

What percentage of equipment reliability would you earmark to poor lubrication?

As you are aware that in Pulp & Paper Plants, the environment is very hot, humid and dusty, which could result in major challenges as far as equipment lubrication is concerned. Tis could result in excessive contamination like moisture, foreign particle contamination & expeditious oxidation (due to heat) of the lubricants Poor lubrication could be a result of several other factors like choice of wrong lubricants, inadequate procedures during placement of orders, poor storage and handling procedures, cross contamination during top-up activities, sampling techniques, inadequate condition monitoring, contamination control and exclusion etc.

In my view, lubrication is to an equipment what blood is to a living being – it is that important. Equipment failures on account of poor lubrication would form around 35 to 40% of all failures.

How have you addressed the issue of reliability connected with lubrication?

Engineers in most Process plants do not have adequate knowledge of standards/ procedures/ best practices on lubrication procedures e.g. storage and handling of lubricants etc and our plant is no exception.

We therefore decided to engage a professional agency to conduct LPD (Lubrication Program Development) at our Balasore (Orissa) plant. Teir team audited each element of lubrication from ordering stage to waste disposal of lubricants and all operations that come in-between (from cradle to grave). Teir comprehensive report not only gave us a SWOT Analysis (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity & Threat) for our lubrication program, but also gave several guiding points on how to achieve “World Class Lubrication” for better equipment reliability.

What were the major challenges that you faced?

The biggest challenge that any management faces is the change of mindset of its operations and maintenance team members. Since lubrication is not given the due importance that it should get, any team would continue to give priority to production or breakdown maintenance etc. It is important that due importance is given to all aspects of lubrication including condition monitoring and other lubrication procedures. Some of these procedures can become an integral part of your predictive maintenance strategy.

How you trained / plan to train your team to take these challenges?

Having taken the frst step of having appointed a professional agency to help us with Lubrication Program Development (LPD), we are considering in-house training sessions for our team of engineers and technicians to train them on various aspects of machinery lubrication, oil analysis and vibration analysis etc. Our team has already gone through an orientation program on as a part of LPD where in they have been sensitised to various aspects of lubrication best practices and how to interpret the LPD report and its implementation.

What do you have to say to the reliability community who are looking to transform their lubrication /reliability program?

It is sometimes said that the admission of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom because once you are aware that you are ignorant, you accept the fact that you don't know everything and want to change that. As I mentioned earlier, most process industries do not have adequate knowledge in lubrication and therefore as a frst step it is important to accept that fact and seek professional guidance from experts such as VAS Tribology.

Having started the process of lubrication transformation, we must keep our focus on introduction of best in class procedures as suggested by the experts. Capturing the data and analysing it to calculate the trends and benefts is also very important. The whole exercise must result in moving from human driven program to a system driven program, thus resulting in lesser errors and thus improved reliability