Shift production report crushing plant

Why a shift production report crushing plant teams actually use looks different

In most operations a sheet is filled in at the end of the shift, filed, and never opened again. Yet that sheet is the only raw material for next quarter's decisions on manpower, spares and capital. When the record is badly structured, all that survives the month is a total tonnage figure, and the reason the figure fell short is left to memory. Memory reliably recalls the one long breakdown and quietly forgets the thirty short ones spread over three weeks.

A sound record answers three questions in the crew's own language: how much did we make, what products did we make, and where did the time we did not produce actually go. The third question carries most of the value and receives the least attention.

The mandatory fields

At minimum a shift record carries the shift number and time window, running hours, feed tonnage, tonnage produced per fraction, quantities to stockpile and to dispatch, the downtime log, fuel or electricity consumed, and a free-text note from the supervisor. Never delete the free text; the information the numeric fields cannot hold usually lives there.

A plant that does not record tonnage per fraction can never measure screening performance. If total output holds steady while the share of the finest fraction creeps up, the screen media is fatiguing or a crusher setting has drifted, and that signal appears weeks before the customer complains.

Coding the reasons for downtime

Recording the duration alone is not enough. Without a reason class, no sum of hours means anything. Keep the list short: beyond about fifteen codes the crew stops discriminating and simply ticks the nearest option. The skeleton below covers most crushing and screening operations.

Two rules belong under the table: one stoppage gets exactly one code, and stoppages shorter than five minutes are logged too. Micro-stops look trivial individually and turn out to be the largest single loss category in many plants once summed.

Reconciling the tonnage

The credibility of the whole record rests on feed and product totals agreeing. When the gap between the weighed feed and the sum of the fractions leaves a sensible band, either a scale needs calibration or the recording discipline has slipped. Calculating that gap every shift and printing it on the report makes the document audit itself.

Handover and signature

Before the report closes, write what the incoming crew inherits: which unit is faulty, which part is on order, which setting was changed. Without a handover note the same fault is rediscovered across three consecutive shifts. The signature is not about blame; it is evidence that somebody actually read the sheet at that hour.

From paper to data

Paper is fine to start with but becomes the bottleneck at the analysis stage. Move the identical field structure into a spreadsheet and a weekly Pareto of downtime takes minutes to produce. The next step is to take the data from the plant itself; where an automation and control system is already installed, running hours and motor load populate themselves and the operator is left only with the reason code.

The weekly reading habit

A record creates value only when it is read. Hold one fixed hour each week, sort downtime by code, take the top three items, and write an owner and a date against each. Open the same list the following week and leave anything unresolved at the top. Without this loop even a well-designed form only produces an archive. How the numbers connect to wider throughput measures is covered under plant efficiency.

Common questions

How many codes are too many

Any code nobody ticks is one too many. Starting with ten and deleting the unused ones works better than starting with thirty and having them all filled in badly.

How do we capture micro-stops

Not by hand. Either ask the operator for an estimated total per shift, or log the run signal. The second route is the honest one and can usually be derived from the existing panel.

Who should complete the report

The supervisor completes it and the operator feeds the downtime lines. Loading it entirely onto one person lowers quality, because the person who witnessed the stoppage is rarely the one signing.