On this occasion, the Center of Technical Excellence (CET, by its acronym in Spanish), through the Knowledge Management (KM) areas of the Research and Development Center and the Optimization area, organized a meeting to capture critical knowledge on Ball Mills. The meeting aimed to continue with the knowledge management cycle and transfer it to other collaborators who may benefit from it.
The purpose of the activity was to share good practices and lessons learned within Progreso, so that they can be used within different operations to improve problem analysis and resolution.
The event included 75 experts, with the participation of 7 plants that have mill operations in 4 Central American countries. Online or virtual communication became relevant and prominent, since the event was organized in hybrid modality. The goal was to connect several plants and provide vitality to the event.
One of the unit’s responsibilities is to gather tacit knowledge from Progresso’s experts. To this end, Progreso is planning to delve deeper and follow an annual calendar to cover more topics and teams along with more experts. This effort will culminate in October with the Technical Symposium.
An innovation that emerged from these meetings, is the creation of the «Knowledge Hub», or Technical Knowledge Base. It will keep the community active by capturing and commenting lessons learned.
Workshops are based on the principle of reusing knowledge and making it available to those who may need it in the near future. The Knowledge Hub has lecture recordings and case studies.
Ball Mills are the most commonly utilized equipment to reduce the size of materials in the cement industry. They are rotating steel cylinders where materials are reduced in size through griding movements of modular elements.
The rotation of the mill cylinder raises the grinding ability to the optimum height necessary. This enables the machine to generate the impact and frictional forces required for size reduction.
