David Reed, director of plant maintenance for Eastman Chemical; Stuart Fondon, senior maintenance planner for ExxonMobil; and Chad Bates, operations and maintenance gatekeeper for BASF.
While accentuating there are always things that can be done to improve strategies and lead to greater reliability in plant maintenance, David Reed, director of plant maintenance for Eastman Chemical, said there is at least one thing he and his team are doing right.
"We are sitting down with operations and looking at what they need for their critical equipment," Reed said.
As a member of a panel on "Schedule breakers: When is an emergency not an emergency?" at the Downstream Exhibition & Conference held recently in Houston, Reed said he and his team have become more comfortable with predictive management strategies.
"We talk through those things, and we ask ourselves the hard questions," Reed continued. "What keeps them up at night? What are the things that make them feel uncomfortable?
"We've got to get enough partnership with operations to be able to do that. We've been able to, but it wasn't easy."
Communication and mitigation
Stuart Fondon, senior maintenance planner for ExxonMobil, noted the need for complete data to plan jobs.
"A lot of the plants are going through a change of learning how to put procedures out there for operations and what needs to come through me as a planner," he said. "If there is a schedule breaker, why is it a schedule breaker? I need to know all that information myself to plan a job. As long as everybody's done their job right and has the right materials and data, I can plan a job in the correct way. If I don't have that [data], I can't do that."
It all comes down to communications, Fondon said.
"It's about us all communicating on the operations and maintenance sides, getting together, having a meeting and making sure we all know what's going on," he said. "It's just communication, but it's not that easy sometimes. People don't like to talk."
Chad Bates, operations and maintenance gatekeeper for BASF, encouraged delegates to examine the consequences of schedule breakers.
"If you have a schedule breaker, what's that going to do? That's going to knock something that was on the schedule off the schedule," he said. "I win a lot of arguments for schedule breakers and not having them, but I also lose a lot of arguments because, in the end, whatever the supervisor wants is what we're going to do."
Schedule breakers equate to lost production, Bates said.
"If you want to break the schedule, tell me what you want to take off of it. Do you want to take off this PM (preventive maintenance) of this agitator seal to work this?" he said. "Or do you want to take off these lube runs that we do once a week? Do you want to take off some of these critical PMs and the predictive work that we're doing? If that's so, go ahead and make the call."
Bates clarified he does not encourage working in unsafe environments, "but there are ways to mitigate safety work orders."
For example, if a safety work order is classified as a Priority 3, "you don't need to plan it to put it on schedule, but you've got 30 days to fix it," he said.
A production supervisor, he explained, may say, "'We've got a steam leak, and we've got to fix it tomorrow. It's a schedule breaker.'"
His response is to ask the supervisor if that leak can be mitigated.
"Can we put a barrier around it so nobody walks through it?" Bates said. "If so, we'll plan it and put it on the schedule for next week," he said. "We'll make sure we've got everything in place and not have to drive up the costs.
"Safety can be mitigated. If it can't be mitigated, then yes, we'll fix it right away."
Amy Odom, asset effectiveness engineer for BASF, also participated in the discussion.
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