AN IMPLEMENTATION OF SIX SIGMA DMAIC METHODOLOGY IN THERMAL POWER PLANT FOR IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Six Sigma (SS) is a rising dominant management tool gradually more utilized for process, value, inventory control etc in various industrial and production sectors across the world. Literature review on implementation of SS for quality improvement and inventory control is well famous and commonly reported, however, its execution and analysis in power plant engineering is very little, in particular critical input raw materials like DM (De-mineralize) water management and raw material inventory. From the history experiences and numerical data, it has been found that even 2% perfection in inventory control in a coal based thermal power plant, may direct to major increase in earnings and reduction in power generation costs. Hence, in this learning, it is anticipated to collect data of input raw materials required for one-year incessant running period (as per plant shut-down schedule) and will be analyzed by applying SS to finally provide output solution accordingly with DMAIC methodology. The present work is an idea to implement Six Sigma in a thermal power plant (TPP) for the two factors of inventory control and DM water consumption by implementing objectives like minimizing De-Mineralize water consumption, dropping generation cost, optimizing lowest water resources, wastage of feed water minimize and develop power generation by inventory control.