Mike Turner, left, senior vice president of global production for Hess Corp., and Walter Pesenti, global manufacturing operational excellence manager for BP.
Reflecting on his various experiences with operational excellence (OpEx) as senior vice president of global production for Hess Corp., Mike Turner said he believes one of the hardest parts about OpEx is that "it touches everybody."
"If you don't watch out, that initiative will destroy all the initiatives you've got going on," he warned.
But the most important part of sustainability, Turner said, "is making sure your systems are in place at the end of the day. That is your sustainable link."
"If your systems are working, it'll last, but you've got to have your processes first," he added, participating in a panel discussion at the Operational Excellence in Oil and Gas Summit held recently in Houston.
Turner noted that in all operational activities he's recently been involved with, "we got lean, we got our standard work processes in place, and that allowed us to go to the next phase, which was basically to get the systems in place."
Turner said he and his colleagues "didn't spend too much time upfront pining over what targets were going to be set for our activities, because we really didn't know what the work processes were."
It's very dangerous to get an asset, set a high target and "not even know how they're going to get there," he continued. "You're going to have safety issues and a lot of different consequences that you probably don't want to have when you start the effort. So the targets came later."
As for maintaining morale and keeping workers motivated while creating a culture of operational excellence, Turner said an awards system was put in place to recognize achievement and proficiency.
"One was the 'PE,' the Production Excellence award. We had all the assets in a bucket of leading/lagging indicators, and we actually started measuring improvement," Turner explained. "The assets that had the most improvement were actually awarded with recognition. It wasn't like cars or chocolates or anything like that. It was basically just a personal recognition from leadership. And that has sustained us over the past 10 years. We still do it at Hess."
Metrics and KPIs
The panel emphasized the importance of utilizing reporting mechanisms, including KPIs and metrics, at the corporate level to send a message of transparency, accountability and company-wide engagement in addressing the results.
"We actually pay our people [based] off of preventive maintenance compliance on safety-critical equipment, so it isn't all about cash balance and cash flow and all that; it's about getting operators out there and making sure they're doing preventive maintenance out on their kit. And that's important," Turner explained, adding that as much as 5 percent of his company's corporate staff bonus program is based on those metrics.
Other metrics focused on severe and significant safety incidents -- "not TRIR, but more around dropped objects and things ⦠that have the potential to hurt people," Turner clarified.
Safety, he insisted, is an essential link to operational excellence metrics.
"It's all about behavior," he said. "It's all about capturing hearts and minds."
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