How do you ensure your next turnaround (TAR) not only minimizes downtime and maximizes revenue but also establishes a sustainable and repeatable roadmap for future success? According to DuPont’s Global Turnaround Execution Leader Mike Tarpine, who has served the company in various capacities for over 28 years, the answer is a method he has dubbed “belief in the plan or process.”
“For me personally, I want people to do the job because they think it’s the right thing to do, not because somebody says, ‘Do that; your performance depends on it,’” Tarpine said recently at the 2016 American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) Reliability & Maintenance Conference and Exhibition. “I want them to believe in the process. I don’t want to go to the plant and say, ‘Do this, this and this, or else.’ I want them to do it because it’s the right thing to do. I want sustainability. I want to come back and hear them say, ‘We learned a lot, and we’re going to get better.’ That was and still is my personal goal.”
Tarpine explained there are many methods of achieving TAR success, but only a process-driven method makes that success sustainable and repeatable.
“If you compare the ‘brute force’ method with ‘belief in the plan or process,’ both of them gain results and both of them involve standardization,” Tarpine elaborated. “With the brute force method — which says, ‘Do it now’ — you’ll see results one time, and then the next time you’ll have to use the brute force method again. But our goal was repeatability, our focus on mindsets and behaviors that promote growth and team development.”
The primary obstacle Tarpine encountered when trying to reach this goal at various sites was the wide range of DuPont’s TAR sizes and complexities.
“When we started this, the challenge really was that at DuPont we have a lot of different sizes and complexities of turnarounds — anywhere from $1 million to $80 million,” Tarpine said. “The size and complexity change from site to site and even on the same site. The frequency varies from six months to six years, and most of the time the next time a turnaround comes around we have different people on the team. We don’t want to have to reteach everything.”
To overcome this obstacle and encourage self-sustainability across teams, Tarpine focused on improving “mindsets and behaviors” and increasing transparency by involving business leaders.
“We wanted to focus on mindsets and behaviors, because we had complacency challenges, competency challenges, different beliefs, different plans, different beliefs on the same plan, and we had accountability problems,” Tarpine explained. “We also had a lot of questions: Do you have a new TAR leader? Who’s on the team? What roles? When should I start planning? What are the milestones? How do you integrate capital projects? And are the business leaders engaged? Many times they were not.”
Ultimately, by providing transparency to business leaders and aligning team behaviors, Tarpine developed a method that is both “tweakable” to various sites and proven to achieve sustainable success.
“This process gave us the flexibility to handle different sizes and complexities of turnarounds, small and large,” Tarpine said. “It was what I call ‘tweakable.’ You could adhere to the foundation of the process but still edit it a little bit to your site and create a standardized roadmap for everyone to follow.
“Currently we have 17 sites using the process. We’ve demonstrated sustainability with minimal oversight. At first there’s a lot of involvement, but after that I don’t have to get involved a lot with the sites. We have a site in Texas we reduced eight days from the previous turnaround of 28 days. In 2015 we saw $10 million in revenue and savings.”
Tarpine insisted his method’s ample success demonstrates the value of enhanced communication across all levels of TAR involvement.
“Everybody has to interact, so team alignment was really our main goal,” Tarpine concluded. “That and engaging the leaders of the business, so they can understand and provide transparency, support and help.”
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