Power equipment major Bharat Heavy Electricals (Bhel) has asked its vendors and suppliers to form clusters to ramp up their scale of operations and meet Bhel?s increased demand, said AV Krishnan, executive director, Bhel (Trichy).
After flagging off four trailers loaded with four 116-tonne ceiling griders for the country?s first 800 mw super critical thermal power station being set up at Krishnapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, Krishnan asked the ancilliary units to increase their scale of operations to achieve an annual growth rate of 30% to 35% to grab huge opportunities thrown open by the power sector. The small industries should form clusters, wherein 100 companies would in the front-end to produce a minimum of 60,000 mt a year, supported by small industrial units forming the second line.
Krishnan also wanted Bhel?s sub-contractors to take up their material procurement instead of getting it from Bhel and develop skills in basic drawings to detailed drawings on their own so as to achieve industrial maturity. He expected that this would help Bhel in loading them PGMA (Product Group Main Assembly) wise instead of component-wise.
As the production through outsourcing increases every year and would reach 7,00,000 tonne in the next two years, Krishnan insisted on the ancillary units buying their own materials to avoid Bhel engaging in unproductive material accounting.
Bhel is executing a contract to install the country?s first two 800 mw rating supercritical units in technical collaboration with Alstom at Krishnapatnam. For this, Bhel has engineered a six-girder arrangement to evenly distribute the ceiling load, instead of the usual practice of four-girder arrangement. The new design has improved the depth of the girder from 3.8 metres to 4.5 metres, resulting in considerable reduction in weight.
Bhel has so far bagged orders for the supply of two supercritical boilers of 800 mw capacity from APPDCL and Raichur Power Corporation (two units) and of 660 mw capacity from NTPC for its Barh project (two units) and Prayagraj Power Generation Company for its Bara (UP) project (three units), company said in a statement here on Wednesday.