According to Bryan Canfield, general manager of Total Petrochemicals and Refining's Port Arthur Refinery, individuals in the energy and manufacturing sectors often believe operational excellence starts with safety.
But that is not the case at Total, he said.
"Safety is a core value, not a priority," Canfield qualified. "Priorities change from year to year, but a core value is a reminder of how you handle your work day in and day out.
"Sometimes I feel like we get so focused on operational excellence we lose that connection to the financial result, the driver behind operational excellence."
Underscoring Total's commitment to safety, each of the company's employees are issued a card that empowers him or her, regardless of title or position on the hierarchical ladder, to stop work without any risk of repercussion.
"We have our golden rules," Canfield added. "We also start every meeting with a safety moment. One of the things that's important is that you need to build these habits until it becomes weird when you don't have them."
Canfield remembers when managers initially introduced those safety moments.
"They said, 'You're going to do this at the beginning of every meeting,' and I thought that was impossible," he said. "Now, when we don't have a safety moment at the beginning of a meeting, people will go, 'Wait a minute; what's going on?' The habit has become ingrained."
This demonstrated commitment to safety is one of the ways Total has established the trust and respect of its shareholders and partners.
In a session titled "Total Case Study: Earning the Right" at the Operational Excellence in Refining and Petrochemicals Summit held recently in Houston, Canfield said "pushing accountability, reducing our cost, improving our availability and focusing on energy efficiency" are keys to increasing dividends to shareholders.
"Every one of these metrics has to be reported and updated," he said, adding Total leaders are required to have a long-term plan demonstrating "how you are going to reduce by X percent per year in energy consumption.
"By 2022, even with a slightly lower pricing basis, we should continue to grow by over 30 percent in our free cash flow. This is shareholder value. This is what makes people say, 'I want to buy stock in Total, because I know they're going to give me that money back.'"
One size doesn't fit all
During a time when Canfield was working in Total's polymer plant, one of the things he and his colleagues discovered was operational excellence can't be achieved by employing a "one size fits all" approach.
"If you build a program that's designed for a major refining platform and you try to impose that on a smaller polymer plant, it becomes so burdensome that you're not really staffed to comply with all those. The process becomes more important than the result," Canfield said. "You're so consumed with trying to comply with all these prescriptive deliverables that you lose sight of what you're trying to achieve."
Canfield believes it is necessary to "leave some latitude for the site responsible to recognize what the principle or the objective is to what you're rolling out, and allow them to adapt to their local organization and capability to deliver against those."
Minimum standards everyone must comply with must also be defined, Canfield said.
"We have company rules and guidelines," he reiterated.
One of the initiatives Total currently has is a "simplification program," Canfield said, that focuses on the objective rather than the process to "make sure that the process facilities are achieving the objective rather than becoming the objective in and of itself."
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