Project challenges
Inox Wind, Rohika, Ahmedabad plant manufactures blades and tubular towers required for windmills. Ten overhead cranes integrate the handling requirements in this vast plant. In an unfortunate incident in 2015, this factory caught fire, gutting it along with the machinery, including the ten overhead cranes.
Being a renowned manufacturer, Inox Wind is known for honouring its delivery commitments. After this incident, the entire team at Inox Wind was determined to rebuild the facilities in the shortest possible time and adhere to the delivery commitments made to their customers.
EOT cranes play a crucial role in the manufacturing process of blades and towers. It is nearly impossible to handle the long and heavy structures without EOT cranes. Considering this aspect, reinstalling the cranes
was among the top priorities for the Inox Wind team. For this, they had two options – the first was to order completely new cranes, and the second was to refurbish the existing cranes. Considering the condition of the damaged cranes, the client’s team wanted to rule out the repair option. While checking the shortest possible delivery period of the new cranes, they realised that it would take 8 to 10 weeks to manufacture, erect and commission these cranes. This was too long a period In order to meet the delivery commitments, it was imperative to start production within just four weeks.
Main manufacturing bay after installing refurbished cranes
The Inox Group is a two billion dollar, professionally managed group with diverse business interests. The group has more than 100 business units across India with a distribution network spread across more than 50 countries around the world. Inox Wind is an Inox Group company and a renowned name in the renewable energy sector. The company undertakes turnkey wind power projects and also supplies windmills for projects by other power companies. Inox Wind is a fully integrated player in the wind energy market with state-of-the-art manufacturing plants at Una (Himachal Pradesh) for hubs and nacelles and Rohika, near Ahmedabad (Gujarat) for blades and tubular towers.
Inox Wind, which had an AMC for all their cranes with Cranedge, shared their concerns with us to check if we could offer a more suitable solution. The Inox team voiced its intention of installing new cranes, but also mentioned the hurdle of a long delivery period and emphasised the need to make the plant operational within four weeks. The suggestion to refurbish the cranes was put forth by the client. Team Cranedge was on site the same day to assess the extent of the damage to the ten cranes. They found that all the cranes were severely damaged and completely nonfunctional.
Solution from Cranedge
Refurbishing and restoring these completely damaged cranes was a great challenge and accomplishing it within four weeks was a near impossible task. However, the Cranedge team decided to tackle the situation head-on since this was the most viable solution, considering the urgent need to restart production.
Initially, the idea of refurbishing the cranes sounded too ambitious to the Inox team. However, after knowing about the cranedge team’s proposed plan of action, they cleared theproject. From that minute onwards, the team started working at lightening speed.
The ElectroMech factory was intimated for the required spares to be despatched on war footing with clear instructions for trucks to leave within a few hours with the first lot. Everyone from our global network was reached to source spares for the foreign make cranes. At Cranedge HQ, an urgent meeting of suppliers was called to request them to cooperate and supply customised items by working roundthe-clock.
On site, several engineers were deployed from the next day onwards. Schedules were set and work plans were chalked out minutely. Teams were formed to work in rotation, so that working round-the-clock would be possible. The excellent coordination, perfect planning and hard work of our dedicated team yielded results on Day 15, when four cranes were made operational. They were almost recreated using only frames, tested for full operation and handed over to the client for use in production. Everyone at Inox Wind was awestruck with this performance of the skilled Cranedge team. But, for Cranedge, this was not the end. The remaining six cranes were also brought to normalcy with equal enthusiasm and speed within the next 30 days.
All the ten cranes were ready for production within 30 days as assured by our team and the production at Inox started in full swing. Everyone was happy since the job was done well and in time. They were also assured of safety because it was a job undertaken by Team Cranedge. Impressed with this performance, Inox Wind awarded ElectroMech with another contract for 25 cranes for their new project in Madhya Pradesh.
A classic example of how the Cranedge team responded to adistress situation!
Benefits to Inox Wind
- Resuming operations in just four weeks saved substantial production losses
- Significant saving in capital expenditure involved in procuring new cranes
- Bringing back cranes to almost new condition increased service life of the cranes
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