POWER March 2012 - 42

OUTAGE MANAGEMENT
Regional Service Organization
Provides Supplemental
Maintenance Support
American Electric Power's Field Services Regional Service Organization augments
resident power plant maintenance teams to provide outage support
and non-outage balance-of-plant support. The augmentation approach
adds significant value to the maintenance process, with the greatest benefits
coming in the areas of expertise, cost, productivity, and ownership.
By Angela Neville, JD
T
he American Electric Power (AEP)
system provides electricity to some 5.3
million customers across 11 states. The
AEP fleet has a total capacity of nearly 39,000
MW and a fuel mix of 66% coal, 22% natural
gas, 6% nuclear, and 6% hydro. In order to
leverage the expertise of its in-house personnel
fleetwide, AEP created the Field Services
Regional Service Organization (RSO). The
advantages of AEP's RSO are numerous: sharing
historical fleet knowledge, reinforcing traditional
partnerships, optimizing fleet outage
schedules, integrating knowledge transfer, and
promoting continuous process improvement.
AEP's RSO consists of 310 full-time employees
who work across the generating fleet.
Rob Osborne, manager of AEP Field Services,
and John Ranegar, manager of AEP Regional
Outage Management, shared details of the
RSO approach with POWER in January.
An Overview of the RSO Approach
The majority of RSO employees are physical
workers in the mechanic, turbine mechanic,
welder, and instrumentation and control
technician classifications. These disciplines
represent the resources necessary to take on
almost any maintenance activity in a generating
station. On some occasions, RSO resources
also have been called upon to supplement
construction resources. The Field Services
organization also has a number of employees
who coordinate the work activities of others.
The Field Services team has a Regional
Outage and Maintenance Planning Team of 14
employees who are responsible for target outage
planning and execution coordination. " Target
outages " represent the greatest risk to AEP
based on cost, schedule, and work scope.
Responsibility for outage implementation
resides with the entire outage execution
team. This team consists of a region outage
manager from Field Services, a plant outage
40
manager, a project manager, and construction
managers from the Major Projects Support
Group, as well as a number of support personnel
from these organizations.
" Outage work is prioritized collaboratively
by all stakeholders, " Ranegar said. " RSO resources
are utilized in the areas that provide
the most value when cost, risk and technical
requirements are analyzed. This transparent
approach to resource prioritization is fundamental
to the RSO success, as we have to
ensure all parties are on board with the utilization
plan for resources. "
The team prepares and supports a completely
integrated outage execution schedule that drives
process ownership and accountability across
the team. The targeted outage readiness process
starts 18 months before the actual outage begins,
requiring all parties to participate in a significant
number of readiness activities. This transparent
readiness process establishes clear expectations
for all team members and raises the accountability
for actions they must take to support successful
execution.
Ranegar explained that the team focuses
its efforts on (and evaluates performance
based on) three phases: Phase 1-readiness/
preparedness, Phase 2-execution, and Phase
3-post-outage performance, where reliability
is the driving success metric. These performance
metrics become part of all stakeholders'
incentive plans. They also encourage the team
to pull on " one rope " together, providing a
common focus and driving team success.
" Disciplined planning drives extraordinary
results, " Osborne said. " Safety is the most important
aspect of any challenge we undertake. "
He emphasized that " projects where we apply
the disciplined outage and maintenance planning
process are our safest and most productive
projects. " The company's policy is that the staff
can complete their work without that work resulting
in employee injury.
www.powermag.com
POWER | March 2012
Centralized Facility
Fosters Expertise
Within Field Services, AEP has centralized
machine shop facilities where nearly all fleet
steam path maintenance repair activities are
performed. These shop facilities allow the company
to optimize outage schedules by prioritizing
work scope and optimize shop resources to
support the highest priority work, in a fashion
similar to that outlined for the RSO group. The
shop facilities group possesses the capability to
re-blade turbine rotors, repair turbine stationary
components, repair and overhaul large steamdriven
pumps, rebuild large axial flow fans,
rewind and repair major generator components,
1. Masterly machining. AEP Field Services
has centralized machine shop facilities
where nearly all the fleet steam-path maintenance
repairs are performed. One example of
the AEP machine shop's high-quality work is
the new replacement wheel installed in the
low-pressure rotor at the 528-MW coal-fired
Flint Creek Power Plant near Gentry, Ark.
Courtesy: American Electric Power
http://www.powermag.com
POWER March 2012

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