Biography
Dr. Rao Palakodeti, PHD, M.Sc, CMRP, CEM
Experienced Consulting Executive with a demonstrated history of working in the power industry. Skilled in operation, maintenance of power plants, Reliability Engineering and Asset Management. Strong engineering professional with a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Mechanical Engineering, Masters in Engineering Management, a Six Sigma Black Belt, Certified Energy Manager (CEM) and Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP). Rao is a Professional Engineer (PE) licensed to practice in the State of Michigan, USA.
From 1971 to 1976, Mr. Rao worked for Hindustan Steel Limited Power Plant in India as Power plant engineer responsible for operation and maintenance of the captive power plant. Supervised maintenance crew both in general maintenance and turbine capital repairs. Initiated and managed projects such as conversion of oil fired boilers to gas, construction of new water clarifier etc.
From 1976 to 1978, Mr. Rao worked for US Utilities Services Corp in Monroeville, PA as Engineer, responsible for designing and building solid waste management sites and leachate collection and treatment systems. Performed land surveying to design the landfills and ash disposal sites.
From 1978 to 1984, Mr. Rao has worked as Plant Engineer and performed Root Cause Analyses, thermal performance tests and boiler efficiency tests. As a startup engineer on the waste water treatment systems, identified the shortfalls with the systems and initiated design changes and revisions.
From 1984 to 1999, Mr. Rao was promoted to Maintenance Manager being responsible to Manage maintenance, supply chain and engineering teams at various power plants. Supervised engineers and first and second level supervisors. Responsible for day-to-day maintenance, preventative maintenance, scheduled maintenance, capital maintenance, plant performance and KPIs. Developed budgets, tracked spending and KPIs. Initiated and successfully completed many reliability and asset management projects.
From 1999 to November 2006, Rao has Established and supervised the Reliability Department. Rao was tasked with improving the reliability of fossil fleet consisting of 8 plants and 24 units. Introduced reliability processes, analyses and methods for fleet reliability improvements. Improved the availability of the fleet by 4% saving the company $30M in purchase power costs in two years.
In addition, Mr. Rao managed the implementation of PM and PdM processes, Maximo and Plant Reliability Optimization (PRO) and Maintenance Basis Optimization (MBO) in the Fossil Generation. Standardized the work flow processes, equipment identification and naming conventions utilizing Hierarchical System Index (HSI). Standardized more than 75,000 pieces of equipment and developed ‘parent-child’ relationships for better tracking the repair history and spare part utilization.
After retiring from DTE Energy, in 2007 Rao was hired as a Sr. Project Manager and assisted the team in implementing Maximo and SAP in the natural gas business owned by DTE. Created predictive monitoring models for Fossil Generation Performance Center using EpiCenter, an algorithm based program developed by SmartSignal. Created around 2000 models reviewing more than 200 million data points.
Rao Joined Alstom Power/GE in July 2009 after working for DTE. He was responsible for setting up the reliability program at Alstom and providing the services to their customers - mostly utilities.
Rao Set up a standardized reliability process and integrated various reliability tools such as Weibull Analysis, Reliability Block Diagrams, FMECA and other. Rao and his team completed analyzing more than 20 power plants around the world comprising 40 units and 121 substations.
Rao Developed ‘Plant CheckUp’, an asset management tool, where a systematic analysis of the asset condition, processes, KPIs etc. are reviewed and recommendations are made for improving the asset Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM). Performed ‘Run/Retire’ assessment of a six unit power plant, impact of cycling on a supercritical plant and cycling impact on 2 on 1 combined cycle plants. Rao retired from Alstom/GE in February 2017
Dr. Rao is also author of several scientific and technical publication since 1991 and has received Honored Awards, Skills and Certification such as Alex Dow Award, Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing Black Belt, Certified Energy Manager (CEM), Certified Reliability and Maintenance Professional (CMRP), Member, ASME Reliability and Performance (RAP) Committee, Professional Engineer (PE) licensed to practice in the State of Michigan, Kepner Tregoe Root Cause Analysis, Cause Mapping Root Cause Facilitator, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) facilitator and Kaizen facilitator.
