Ahmedabad: Adani Transmission Ltd (ATL) being a power transmission and distribution utility company, the preventive maintenance forms an important facet of its operations, as timely maintenance and upkeep of equipment and components can maintain power quality and reliability while ensuring uninterrupted power supply, which is critical for business continuity. ATL is India’s largest transmission and distribution private sector utility and is reputed for its robust transmission system availability i.e., 99.62 percent for current year. The company has added 3,080 ckm to India’s electricity grid network, taking the company’s total transmission network to 18,567 ckm. Amid this growth, ATL has been striving to improve its processes to reduce delays and wastages of both time and resources, across domains & functions.
In one such endeavour, the company decided to introduce the Japanese technique of Makigami Analysis in its office process improvement program. ATL presented a case study on this program at the 2nd edition of CII’s National Office Innovation Competition and was awarded the Silver Winner in Process Flow Improvement Category.
By definition, Makigami analysis technique is a structured approach to detect all the losses that are occurring during process execution. Makigami is a form of a process mapping tool which focuses on visualizing aspects of the organization which are not physical or directly visible. The Makigami Process Map helps improvement of the process by designing a future state roadmap after dealing with the identified losses and to find ratio of value added to non-value-added activities.
The journey began with a knowledge sharing sessions in 2021 and turned into a continuous improvement drive commenced with ice-breaker workshops and deep-dive assessments for the office and site processes, followed by top management reviews. With the start of 2022, ATL prepared a KAIZEN deployment plan for identified improvement areas and initiated implementation in February 2022.
The theme of the competition was based on effective implementation of Makigami tool for the office processes. From ATL, the nomination was submitted from Operations & Maintenance division, for the process related to efficiency improvement in “Purchase requisition to Purchase order release (PR2PO)” wherein several sub processes and their interactions were studied and analyzed deeply through Makigami tool and an effective way of its application was demonstrated along with the finalized actions, ready for implementation.
The case study’s problem statement comprised of a) delay in material/service delivery, affecting scheduled preventive maintenance (PM) activities, b) delay/deferment in PM activities leading to potential system availability impact & hence loss in incentives & budgeted revenues, c) non-value adding activities & time loss in unnecessary repeated transactions and d) quality time wasted in administration work & follow-ups instead of productive work.
KAIZEN implementation using the Makigami tool resulted into the revelation & unearthing of several concerns regarding the office process. The exercise brought to surface the underlying factors for various concerns adversely plaguing the office process flow, as also constant deliberations with cross-functional teams led to innovative ideas and approaches to address them sustainably – establishing new practices for overall improvement in the system performance.
The case study, awarded by CII for process flow improvement, will result into – reduction in efforts of techno commercial executives by having more Annual Rate Contract items & load balancing the contracts, reduction in risk for loss due to non-availability of spares (Amount incurred for urgent repair and Revenue Lost), and reduction in administrative efforts for follow-up and purchase requisition & purchase order rework.
These improvements will help ATL’s O&M team to eliminate the pre-PR process for low value items, improve the PR to PO conversion ratio, while maximizing ARC. The best practice has ensured that the workload of the team spread uniformly throughout the year so that there is no jumbling nor crowding of PRs to be converted into POs in a rushed manner.