According to Jimmy Jernigan, manager of global reliability process for LyondellBasell, there is an initial deliverable that is key for responding to plant emergencies.
"The way our process is built, our first step is going to be for operations to try to understand what we have to do to shut it down and make it safe," Jernigan said. "While that's going on, usually our maintenance and reliability teams are backing up and trying to start troubleshooting to understand what the scope might be in starting that very initial plan process."
LyondellBasell's operations and maintenance specialists "are the core folks who do that initial triage and try to figure out what's going on," Jernigan said, participating in a panel discussion titled "Getting it right the first time: Process, process, process" at the Downstream Exhibition & Conference held recently in Houston. "And then supervision and engineering come in behind that to help things out as things progress. But our first step is around safety and making sure there are structure-aligning plans."
Gerry Brooks, director of maintenance for Westlake and session moderator, asked the panel to describe "gatekeeper or validator" positions within their respective companies' maintenance organizations, whether in reliability engineering or operations that contribute to the first-response process.
Amy Odom, asset effectiveness engineer for BASF, said BASF's process always begins with the maintenance gatekeeper.
"In most of our units, that gatekeeper is a part of our asset manager structure," she said, "so they don't report up through operations."
Her company's operations manager, a mechanical engineer, has a maintenance background, Odom said.
"For us, it's worked very well," she continued. "You have to be very careful who you choose for that role because they have to be somebody who can push back to operations when they need to."
Communication, 'challenge culture' key
Reliability engineers and a mechanical maintenance engineer complete the gatekeeping group, Odom said.
Odom explained her role as the asset manager. "I say, 'OK, if we're going to be down for three days or sometimes a month working on this thing, what are we giving up? What is that downtime worth to us? Is there a way to get around that?'" she said.
Odom said BASF also recently hired a mechanical maintenance and reliability manager.
"He looks at the budgets to make sure that we're making the right decisions about hot-shotting parts in if we don't have them, and he is a key part of the [gatekeeping] process, too," she said.
Odom stressed that "communication is the key."
"We all talk to each other, we make sure we're spending money in the right places, and we make sure we're making good decisions on the priority of the work we're doing," she said.
Dana Hanning Jr., manager of reliability and maintenance for Flint Hills Resources, touted the "challenge culture" between his company's operations and maintenance teams.
"We started challenging operations," he said. "We said, 'What can we do to make them more comfortable with a piece of equipment being out of service for an extended period of time to do a better job of scoping, planning and driving that?'"
Specialists were assigned to operate other pumps and perform other tasks "that would give them the level of comfort [such] that we were going to be able to survive that downtime and ... fix it right that time," Hanning said. "Our mechanical specialist has a saying up on his wall: 'Nobody has time to fix it right the first time, but everybody's got time to fix it twice.'"
