Product category:
Bearings, lubrication, oil and filters
News Release from: Castrol UK | Subject: Tate and Lyle
Edited by the Processingtalk Editorial
Team on 13 October 2004
Sweet success with third maintenance
contract
At the end of Tate and Lyle's three-year lubrication management contract with Castrol, the group decided to incorporate its Greenwich plant in the next phase: the relationship with Castrol continues
At the end of Tate and Lyle's three-year lubrication management contract with Castrol, the group decided to incorporate its Greenwich plant in the next phase and review other options to ensure it was still achieving value for money and best practice Tate and Lyle engineering and projects manager Glenn Clarke explains why Castrol was awarded the contract for a second three-year term
This article was originally published on Processingtalk on 8 Apr 2003 at 8.00am (UK)
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The Tate and Lyle Thames refinery at Silvertown, London is the largest cane sugar refinery in the world.
The site, together with Tate and Lyle Plaistow (can making and syrup filling) and Greenwich (starches and sweeteners) plants further up the Thames, is also one of Castrol's largest lubrication management contracts in the food sector.
As you would expect from the biggest cane sugar refinery in the world, the Silvertown site is a large scale processing plant.
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Around a thousand people work there, and literally hundreds of machines such as gearboxes, centrifuges, big rotary driers, etc, produce 1.1 million tonnes of cane sugar every year in a 365-days per-year, 24-hour operation.
Prior to Castrol's involvement six years ago, Tate and Lyle managed its own lubrication, which engineering and projects manager Glenn Clarke admits wasn't structured or organised as effectively as it could be.
"Because we didn't have the expertise to maintain effective lubrication schedules or compliance monitoring, we decided it was time to bring in a specialist." He says.
Tate and Lyle looked at options from several oil lubricant specialists and were most impressed by what Castrol had to offer in quality of services, product range and price competitiveness.
Which is why Castrol was appointed, says Glenn Clarke.
Commenting on the benefits of outsourcing to Castrol he says the impact was immediate.
"Castrol introduced a structured regime that gave us immediate gains in plant reliability from fewer lubrication related failures, and we experienced a dramatic reduction in bearing and gearbox failures.
"Castrol also introduced oil and vibration analysis as the contract developed, which helped us to pre-empt equipment failures and identify where we could make positive changes within the plants".
This combination of busy plant, hundreds of items of equipment and continuous processes also means that Tate and Lyle is acutely aware of its responsibility to eliminate any possible product contamination from lubricants.
As Glenn Clarke explains: "To ensure that food compatible lubricants are used wherever necessary, we worked with Castrol to develop a HACCP audit that identified areas that could be a potential risk.
Wherever it was possible to completely remove the risk of contamination we use standard lubricants, but where there remained an element of risk we changed to Castrol food grade lubricants".
Raw sugar coming into the busy refinery is offloaded at Silvertown's own jetty, and, at the other end of the refining process, the site accommodates a huge packing operation that uses high speed machines to pack the vast amounts of sugar into a variety of packaging.
So, as Glenn Clarke points out, Castrol cover the whole plant - from offloading, through processing, to bagging!.
He stresses that these vital facilities are included in the Castrol contract and are also HACCP audited to eliminate the risk of contamination.
When the time came to renew the original contract for another three years, Tate and Lyle took the opportunity to incorporate its Greenwich site into the lubrication management service (It had previously been serviced by Castrol for two years on a separate contract).
With three plants now covered by the contract, the company also decided to look again at other suppliers, just to make sure it was still getting value for money and maintaining best practice.
Having reviewed several leading oil companies, it was decided to stay with Castrol, and a further three-year contract has now been signed.
The Castrol lubrication management service, which is operated by an on-site team of five at the Tate and Lyle - Thames Refinery site (contract manager Duncan Glynn and four lubrication technicians) and a team of three at the Greenwich site (Contract Manager Matthew Hill and two lubrication technicians ), integrates vibration analysis, oil analysis and thermography, to create a comprehensive predictive maintenance regime.
Castrol administers all the lubrication schedules using its own software and all vibration analysis schedules and diagnosis are done using third party software.
A unique reporting tool was developed by Castrol on site, enabling real time recording of equipment status.
The system allows all faults to be flagged immediately, with dynamic links to the relevant reports and other information.
Glenn Clarke says Castrol's regular reports are excellent - easily understood and targeted directly to the relevant plant, enabling the operations and maintenance staff to deal with any issues before they become serious problems.
"The reports are a key factor in our operation and a vital part of our preventative maintenance regime, because they identify problems before they happen", he says, adding that Castrol is also responsive to other engineering issues and, because they have access to a range of mechanical specialists, will help to investigate any failure whether it is lubrication related or not.
Commenting on cost savings he says that in such a production-intensive plant they are difficult to quantify, but reports that the Silvertown plant has seen a dramatic reduction in the number of bearings and gearbox failures and the Greenwich plant experienced an equally dramatic reduction in bearing failures in equipment that had historically failed regularly.
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