Success in business is a lot like success in football, according to Daryl Leggett, maintenance leader for Braskem.
"When a team is making a play together, it is very important how they interact with each other," he said. "That will determine whether they win or lose. Each person has a separate responsibility. The key is not about who makes the tackle. It's whether or not the entire team is successful, and that only happens if everybody is doing their part and they're all working together."
Braskem's leaders knew the "majority of issues" at the company were "due to the fact that there was a lack of clarity between roles and responsibilities," Leggett said at the 10th Annual Chem/Petrochem and Refinery Asset Reliability Conference held recently in Houston.
Maintenance work process documentation was rolled out in 2004, Leggett said.
"But we've had multiple iterations where other owners had purchased the actual plant, and we've had turnover in both leadership and team members," he added.
These changes in leadership and personnel led to "people kind of stepping away from the process," Leggett said. "They started creating their own work processes to make their jobs easier. When they tried to make their jobs easier, they created a gap, even though they were working hard and trying their best to execute their jobs."
Leggett said it became apparent that a review of this work process was essential "to really dig into the details, understand how it was designed to operate" and reset the process.
Steps to reset
The reset required a specific, multistep strategy to be effective. One of the first steps in the reset, Leggett said, was to identify frustrations among personnel.
"Then we compared what was being done to how it was designed to be done, developed an action plan and aligned with leadership," he said.
It took approximately four months for the reset team to move from understanding the problem to developing an action plan to address that problem.
The next steps, implementing the plan and determining how it would be rolled out, took five months.
"We spent more time developing how we wanted to do it, how we were going to train and who was going to be impacted by it than actually developing the plan itself," Leggett said. "I truly believe that spending the time on the 'how' is what helped us."
Part of the reset's rollout strategy included smaller meetings with the plant's superintendent and manager, added Leggett.
"We got the buy-in from those leaders, and from there we broke into smaller individual sessions with the maintenance team, day staff, schedulers and planners, mechanics, production superintendents and shift supervisors," he explained. "That allowed them to process what they were going to do differently in that 'safe space' and allowed them to give feedback on things they thought were right or not right."
The new work process plan was complete within two more months, Leggett said.
"In 2019, we really honed in on making some improvements," he noted, adding that "phase two" of the reset will focus on field execution.
"Everything we did was administrative: planning, documents, feedback and scheduling. But we really hadn't gotten to the point of talking about precision maintenance -- some of the rebuilds, strategies and procedures -- and also our asset management program," Leggett said. "So that is our path forward. By no means are we done.
"It's our hope that as we roll into the next phase, we will still take this approach of following that design, but also spend time on the 'how.'"
