Effective Improvements

UMP JSC launched the '10,000 Improvements Program' 17 years ago in October. The program is based on Gemba Kaizen lean principles.

UMP employees began to apply Kaizen tools right away. And despite the name – «Program of 10 000 improvements», the plant workers have long ago exceeded this figure.

Within the framework of the 10,000 Improvements Program for 17 years (as of 30.09.2023) UMP employees have submitted 17,001 ideas, 11,401 of them have been implemented, the number of program participants is 2,580 employees. And the economic effect from the introduction of innovation proposals amounted to almost 1.8 billion tenge!

Here is one of the examples. At Uranium Operations this year the project «Restoration of AVN 1.6/32 vortex pump sump» was implemented. Authors: Evgeny Kovtun, Vladimir Antropov, Alexander Shushanikov.

Alexander Shushanikov, Mechanic of Workshop «B» of Uranium Operations:

– We proposed to apply the technology of restoring the operability of AVN 1.6/32 vortex pump by machining the surfaces of the part «pump sump». It includes: removal of the sump, mechanical processing of its damaged surface on a lathe and screw-cutting machine (in this case a layer of the part material from 0.5 to 1.0 mm is removed). Then the pump is assembled individually – the dimensional chain in this process is compensated by special metal gaskets included in the pump set. The dimensions of the pump's working chamber are not disturbed and the tightness of the assembly is ensured by a compensating fluoroplastic gasket. This operation can be performed up to two times. The developed technology allows to restore the performance and technical characteristics of the pump with low costs, to extend the service life of products and excludes the purchase of expensive repair parts.