Up Time Magazine- April/May 2008 - (Page 12) worth of experience, aspiration, frustration and knowledge. The one comment that stands out in my mind – from arguably the most influential blue collar worker of them all – was that “no matter what” the length of time a job takes will continue to remain the same. Now bear in mind this is in opening introductions – the details of the program were not even known at this point. But this is the reality of change management in some unionized and hourly paid environments. I’ll come back to this comment later. The training itself went well, and within a week we were into our first workshop. Big Diesel Success Sometimes we get lucky. And sometimes we put ourselves in a position to get lucky. We prioritized our base load engines for RCM, and our pilot project targeted the performer with the lowest availability of that group of 8 diesel engines, the largest pair of engines which can produce a steady 14.4MW each. It just so happened that in the very first hour of our very first workshop, we got lucky. This never before assembled team of subject matter experts hashed out the details that would form the basis for eliminating a complete outage in the outage cycle of this engine. In the diesel world, we largely classify outages as minor and major. In this case with 3 minor outages and one major outage (teardown) before restarting the cycle again over an 18 month period. The team deduced the means of eliminating one of the minor outages and extending the time between them such that we could complete a full maintenance cycle with 3 outages instead of 4. Better yet, if these plans proved feasible, we would reduce the minor outage time from 7 days to 3 days. This first hour of work put us 1/3 of the way toward our goal of cutting downtime in half. In general, the workshop format was to use our existing work plans, determine the failure modes and consequences embedded in them and formulate appropriate tasks and intervals to manage those failures. We rotated subject matter experts in and out as the agenda required, never keeping an individual for more than 5 days, with the exception of the operaapril/may 2008 fuel savings – as more than half the expenditures of the firm go to fuel costs. A 3% fuel savings would increase the company’s earning per share (EPS) by 11%. We estimated that, including wasted labor and materials, this would result in a 16% increase in EPS over time. Figure 2 - The best and brightest staff from Operations, Maintenance, Planning and Engineering were allocated to work on the PMO project. These numbers are little motivation for unionized, hourly paid staff. They come to work on very different terms than do salaried staff. So the presentation to our union staff emphasized the need for improvement in our corporate performance – a perennial issue in any company. The logic of RCM was emphasized and was ultimately the key tool for garnering their support of the process – it made sense and they were driving the change based on their own experiences of what made sense. our aggressive targets in place, we were allocated the best and brightest staff from each discipline – operations, maintenance, planners and engineers – to carry out our task. Pulling the best staff off the shop floor in the middle of “outage season” is no mean feat, and took real guts by our management. We promised that for every day they were off the tools, we would save 4 days on the tools and that return on investment was attractive. The training session was split into two groups. The facilitator used a very enlightening process to open up the training program by having each individual introduce themselves and list their top 3 unresolved issues with maintenance. The list – which we ensured we kept for posterity – reads like a “what’s what” list in the maintenance world. It contains the types of things you cannot learn in a textbook or in an engineering degree course. In a few minutes we captured several decades’ Rallying the Troops Our first act in initiating change was to train staff in PMO based RCM philosophy. With 12
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.