It's not a once-in-a-while endeavor, nor something plant managers engage in before an audit. When it comes to operational excellence, Greg Kiihne, director of process safety expert services for BASF, said, "We need to make time for continuous improvement every day."
"Even if you are world-class, you should be seeking to continually better yourself," Kiihne said in a session titled "Instilling a Zero Loss of Containment Mindset" at the Operational Excellence in Refining and Petrochemicals Summit held recently in Houston.
In keeping with that theme, Kiihne said while the focus of his position has been "mindset," he also warned against fixation on the "zero loss of containment" aspect of the title.
"I am not giving you a goal that you have to meet at the end of the year; that's not it at all," Kiihne said. Rather, Kiihne said, the emphasis should be on embracing a zerospills mentality when operators perform their various activities.
"Have that mindset that you are going to do this task properly," he said. "When you go out into the field to change a filter, have the right procedure and right materials. Make sure everything is locked out right, do all your quality checks and pressure checks and whatever you need. And then when you start up again and put it back into service, make sure there's no spill or release."
Kiihne noted multitasking can often be an impediment to operational excellence.
"When we dig into our incident reports, we find that the operator started a transfer, and even though the procedure says to stay with the transfer, the operator went over and started doing something else," he said. "He came back and either while he was gone the transfer went too long and overfilled the vessel, or the hose was starting to drip a little bit and then it came completely off, which led to a bigger spill. But he wasn't there to see that."
Kiihne described multitasking as "doing a lot of things not very well and all at the same time."
He encouraged managers to help operators understand doing one thing and doing it well is, in the long run, faster and more efficient.
"My brother, who was a naval aviator, said their mantra was, 'Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,'" Kiihne said. "So take your time, do one task at a time, do it right, and ultimately it's going to be faster than trying to do everything at once."
No crystal ball
Identifying weaknesses, implementing necessary changes and then checking performance are three imperative considerations in striving for continuous improvement, Kiihne said.
Reporting every spill is necessary to improvement, Kiihne said, adding it is equally necessary to be proactive -- a goal that can be viewed as being somewhat elusive.
"What do I do to be proactive? I just need to see into the future to see which of the things I am dealing with will become problems," Kiihne joked.
Short of being blessed with the gift of prophesy, managers and operators can become more proactive, Kiihne recommended, by "taking the information based on your experience and the experience of others and acting on that information to make the right choices to prevent future problems."
In addition to creating more engagement with BASF's employees, Kiihne said "an unintended benefit" of reporting and investigating all of the spills that occur at the company's approximately 90 sites is an increase in the flow of information.
"When you have a lot of data points, you can see a clearer picture of what the data is telling you," he explained. "We can use that picture then to do all kinds of data analysis to figure out where to dedicate our resources and to see where we can get better beyond just the big things that we have to do."
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