Numerous approaches exist to improve performance outcomes in process plants, such as including Operations Excellence Methodology or Lean Six Sigma into a strategy (or excluding it). However, the strongest organizations are those that take the time to develop a structured strategy with clearly defined goals and timelines, a process for documenting and evaluating benchmarks, definitions for failures and successes, and communications that create a clear map to success.
Unfortunately, it is more common for organizations to have a “high-level” strategy at the top and something closer to a collection of mini-strategies on the front line. These mini-strategies often are tethered to the overall strategy above but don’t connect to each other or miss the goals and communications between one another.
Another piece of this problem is that team leads and managers will often insist a clear strategy is in place when what they really have is a collection of tactics that has evolved organically and may not be integrated or are in separate silos — these are branded as the strategy. This creates a false sense of confidence where the reality is a vague plan that lacks timelines, definitions of successes and failures, a process evaluation, and an outdated or unclear method for documentation.
The result of an unclear strategy is a workforce that is unprepared to meet challenges as they arise. This lack of preparedness can take many forms, including start-up delays, operational errors, personnel shortages, quality losses, decreased throughput, cost increases and many more. Some consequences are less obvious due to the time-consuming and costly undertaking of identifying the root cause, but these problems can create a ripple effect throughout an entire facility, starting from simple mistakes made in the field.
The first step for a refined strategy that can address these problems is to achieve situation clarity. This step is essentially an organization’s formal moment of reflection to assess where a facility truly stands, how it is truly performing, and the ability of personnel to effectively communicate and respond to the needs across a site.
For maintenance teams and plant reliability, a good place to start is to analyze how much work is unplanned against how much is planned. Once analyzed, the amount of planned work should be close to 100 percent, taking into account emergency work. A higher percentage of unplanned work is an indicator of other problems.
For operations, a good place to start is to identify the major delays and recurring problem areas within the process. What are the root causes, and how long does it take to identify them? What are the average operator response times? How often do operators and maintenance staff physically check red flags and alarms? Knowing the answers to questions like these can help identify key metrics for improvement.
Once current situation clarity is achieved, defining the goals of a strategy becomes more achievable. Establishing clear goals and definitions of success contributes to an effective performance improvement strategy that can improve plant reliability and operator effectiveness. Operator effectiveness has numerous benefits, including helping to avoid stops due to operator errors such as misinterpreting operational variables or processes.
Implementing structured programs improves troubleshooting, emergency response and related skills operators need to avoid these process stops, ensuring the continuity of operations.
When situation clarity, processes and communication come together to create a structured, cohesive strategy, the results speak a thousand words. Although some of the results can be difficult to quantify — like improvements to operator morale — some benefits are immediate and easy to see, and some are long-term. At one facility that suffered from longer-than-average response times, implementing a model and its structured program elements lowered the response times from 90 to 30 minutes for a total reduction of 60 minutes. In another case, a western U.S. refinery realized a nearly 60-percent reduction in recordable events in an affected unit after implementing a structured training program specific to the unit. The results speak through clarity.
For more information, call Lindsey All at (225) 663-5833 or email process@gpstrategies.com.
