In his 30-year career, Jim Stump, senior vice president of refining at HollyFrontier Corporation, has witnessed and been involved in many watershed movements propelled by collaboration.
"Breaking down the barriers of working together has been crucial to improving safety in our industry as well as safety and overall performance at HollyFrontier," Stump said.
In his current role, Stump oversees refinery operations, including safety, compliance, operations and capital projects. He has spent 29 years of his career with HollyFrontier and has watched the company grow from just one refinery to nine refinery and lubricant facilities.
Personally, Stump is passionate about safety and how it has benefitted HollyFrontier and the entire industry over the years. He credits collaboration with improving overall safety at HollyFrontier and throughout the industry, but he said collaboration has not always been as common as it is now, especially due to the industry's competitive nature.
Rules of collaboration
Defining collaboration as the action of working together to produce something or to achieve a goal, Stump shared the "five rules of collaboration."
Rule No. 1, he noted, is that teamwork must involve multiple team members to ensure diversity and combat a "my way versus your way" mentality.
"Two people don't make up a network," Stump advised. "To ask two people to collaborate means one wins and one loses."
At about the same time that HollyFrontier was establishing networks to drive collaboration, Stump was asked to participate in a new initiative created by industry trade groups known as the Advancing Process Safety initiative. His involvement with the team that was setting up Regional Process Safety Networks helped to establish the guidelines that HollyFrontier used to establish its own networks.
To promote sharing practices and ideas, Stump said HollyFrontier began to set up networks in the areas of mechanical integrity, conduct of operations, safety and process safety, and environmental compliance.
Rule No. 2 is team members must have the time available to create and work outside of the occasional meeting.
"Creating a full-time, dedicated team is pivotal," Stump said, adding it is unwise to only include members who already have full-time jobs. HollyFrontier's conduct of operations team was initially composed of six operations managers and a corporate team member who all held full-time positions outside of their roles. To solve this challenge, Stump said a full-time team was created that consisted of an operations representative from each of the six sites, led by a dedicated, seasoned operations manager.
Rule No. 3, Stump said, is the team must be led by a person respected for his or her knowledge and leadership ability.
"Networks need a good leader," he advised. Just "picking a peer" doesn't produce beneficial results. However, once a leader is in place, things begin to move.
"Our mechanical integrity team started getting real traction early," Stump recalled. "One of the keys to success was having a corporate lead who had a structured approach for the team."
Rule No. 4 is improvement teams must be structured, which should include charters, work plans and clear deliverables. When the industry's Advancing Process Safety initiative rolled out the Site Assessments program, HollyFrontier quickly signed up to participate.
By participating in the program, the team received valuable guidance for improvement through the operating practices protocols.
"We have rolled out new processes and tools for shift turnover, operator rounds, procedures, operator training and a myriad of targeted procedures for things like winterization, rail car loading and housekeeping," Stump said.
Rule No. 5 is to remove competition to promote collaboration. HollyFrontier faced this barrier at one time, Stump explained, but with some work, the six individual sites were able to reach a point of collaboration.
Overcoming competition
Stump shared an alternative definition of collaboration: "traitorous cooperation with the enemy." He said the pressure of competition is a challenge the industry and his own company have to overcome.
At HollyFrontier, the team realized competition was an issue once it began to form networks and encourage collaboration among its separate facility sites. The company and teams have since worked to align incentives around how the overall fleet is performing rather than how individual sites are performing.
"We had to tear down this well-established culture of competition before we could really win through collaboration," Stump said. "We changed our dialogue to get away from 'winners' and 'losers' within our own company and replaced it by talking about how well we are doing as a whole. Employees now volunteer constantly to help another plant with a challenge."
To illustrate how competition can be a barrier to collaboration, Stump used historical examples of events in the U.S. refining industry. In the early 1970s, for instance, President Richard Nixon launched Project Independence to reduce the U.S.'s reliance on foreign petroleum. Through this initiative, the government would control the price of crude oil and petroleum products in the U.S. Stump explained that because of Project Independence, there were nationwide fuel shortages, but refiners had guaranteed profits. Refineries across the U.S. grew, but they only operated at 70-percent utilization.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan signed an executive order to end government control of the pricing. The goal was to enable fair market trade in the industry.
However, the executive order resulted in the decommissioning of nearly half of U.S. refineries and started a long period of competition among them, with most operating at more than 90-percent utilization. The most reliable plants made the most profit, and many companies kept their best practices "competitive trade secrets" to guard their reliability.
"This competition was a barrier to our companies helping each other," Stump said.
A gift that keeps giving
The 2010 accident at the Tesoro Anacortes Refinery in Washington was a catalyst in starting industry-wide collaboration. Stump said Tesoro gave the industry "a gift" by sharing the details of the incident, which urged collaboration among industry members to address the risks of high-temperature hydrogen attacks. This incident sharing and collaboration helped the industry understand that mechanism and has since helped prevent other incidents, he said.
Also in 2010, industry leaders came together through API and AFPM to discuss how to improve the entire industry's safety performance through collaboration. This discussion began the Advancing Process Safety initiative.
"We've come a long way in both managing Advancing Process Safety initiatives and creating better relationships with those agencies that oversee plant safety," Stump said. "Some of the most meaningful incident- sharing and practices collaboration is enabled by the courage to take carefully managed legal risk in addressing industry safety concerns."
For more information, visit www.hollyfrontier.com.
