Case Studies in Maintenance and Reliability: A Wealth of Best Practices. V. Narayan

Contractors and their personnel were viewed with suspicion by the refinery and always kept at arm’s length.

      During execution of shutdowns, the maintenance engineer was supposed to be the coordinator. Other participating departments did not recognize his role because top management never announced it formally. As a result, the execution was as if there were many separate football games instead of one well-orchestrated team.

      In the past, management did not formally spell out the objectives of the shutdown. The duration was fixed by the refinery schedulers on the basis of past history. Authorization of overtime work, extra work, additional contract work, etc., was done in an ad hoc fashion, without an overall guiding principle or premise. In short, there were no clear answers to the following questions, before and during the course of the shutdown:

      •Why are we carrying out this shutdown?

      •On what basis is maintenance and inspection work selected?

      •Is the shutdown to be realized in the shortest possible time?

      •Is the shutdown to be realized at the lowest possible cost?

      •What are the economic consequences to the refinery and its partners if the shutdown is realized a day earlier or a day later than planned?

      •Who is the person overall in charge of the shutdown activities?

      •Is the work going as per plan?

      •Are the costs on track?

      Top management rarely, if ever, visited the shutdown site. Cost and time over-runs were accepted as inevitable.

      The management team, including the Maintenance and Engineering Manager, considered maintenance as a necessary evil. In their perception, maintenance was primarily the act of fixing things when they broke down. As long as there was a credible story to explain to the outside world why a plant did not deliver its planned production, they were happy. There was no impact on the compensation to the refinery!

      5.5 Economic Imperatives

      The high cost however, was reflected in the selling price of the products of the refinery. By the time I arrived on the scene, the operating cost had reached such a level that the products coming from this refinery were barely competitive with imports. The refinery ceased to make economic sense and had thus lost its raison d’être!

      Inevitably, the threat of a close-down of the refinery loomed, unless it took steps to become competitive with imports. For the first time in its history, the refinery was under pressure to improve its cost performance.

      5.6 New Brooms—To Sweep Clean

      A new refinery General Manager (GM) arrived at this time. As maintenance cost (always a major portion of the total operating cost of a refinery) was running at a much higher level than benchmark levels, he sensed the urgent need for expertise and leadership for the Maintenance and Engineering function. The person the new GM selected for this job had to have hands-on experience of several years in process industry at various levels of hierarchy in several locations around the world. I was fortunate to catch his attention, and so got the job.

      When I arrived to take over the position of Maintenance and Engineering Manager, a planned major plant shutdown was about six months away. It took me about two weeks to sum up the situation. The next task was to change the prevailing mind-sets and behaviors.

      5.7 Improvement Process

      I decided to use a top-down and bottom-up approach simultaneously. I would explain a principle to the management team, convince them of its benefit, get their commitment to it, and then do the same in my own line. I went through this process applying five principles. Throughout this campaign, I used my daily walk-about in the process units and workshops talking to the people I met. I conducted several shop-floor meetings to explain the five principles.

      Using an open door policy facilitated one-on-one debates on relevant topics with anyone who chose to come. This established credibility with staff and helped build a strong case for change. In a period of ten weeks, I explained these principles and obtained the support of relevant personnel and the management team. Cynics were silenced by peer pressure.

      The refinery was now ready to try out the new paradigm on day-to-day maintenance, as well as the approaching shutdown, now about three months away.

      5.8 The Five Principles

      Principle 1—Define a Maintenance Philosophy

      Through this step, we defined the purpose of maintenance and the manner in which it would be carried-out, and stated it as follows:

      “The purpose of maintenance is to keep the technical integrity of assets secure, and to ensure that their operational reliability is at all times at the level which our refinery business needed. Maintenance activities should be carried out in a safe and environmentally responsible manner. This should be achieved with the maximum possible efficiency so that the overall cost, i.e., the sum of direct and consequential costs, is minimized.”

      It took some time and effort to make most people really understand the meaning of this definition; but once that happened, there was visible enthusiasm especially among the plant operators and maintenance workers. For the first time ever, refining economics reached people at the shop-floor level. Indeed these were the people who made things happen! Everyone could clearly see the direction in which the maintenance effort needed to be pushed.

      Principle 2—Maintenance is a Business Process, Not Just a Department

      This principle attempted to break down departmental barriers and promote team spirit. The general message was that Maintenance, as defined in Principle #1, was a business process which transcended departmental boundaries. Unless all participants in the process—namely, operators, technologists, inspectors, and maintainers—worked as a team, the process would not perform optimally.

      Explained in this manner, the principle met little resistance and was readily accepted. The best measure of this was that representatives of all the disciplines started attending morning meetings in the main control room. In these meetings we reviewed the events in the past 24 hours and decided actions needed.

      Principle 3—Contractors are Essential Partners in the Enterprise

      It was not optimal to carry all the manpower required to do maintenance work using our own payroll. This was because of two main reasons. First, the work load varied a lot. Second, not all skills were required all the time.

      Therefore, this refinery, like most of process industry, carried a base-load manpower on its payroll and did peak-shaving using contractors. In our case, the peak manpower, annualized by averaging over the shutdown cycle, was about 30% more than the base manpower. Individual peaks were many times more. Thus, contractors were major participants in the maintenance process; unless they felt part of the team, their performance could not be optimal.

      This principle also found ready acceptance except from the Finance function. They needed further convincing that there were sufficient checks in place to prevent malpractice when contractors’ personnel worked as a team with refinery personnel.

      Principle 4—Define the Day-to-Day Maintenance Process

      We defined the day-to-day maintenance process using the diagram shown in Figure 5.1

Figure 5.1 Day to Day Maintenance Process

      The main features of this process are:

      •The key participants in the Maintenance process work as a team; priorities are clearly defined and understood, and all work is screened by this team.

      •Proactive work is determined with the help of risk-based methodologies; it is planned and scheduled for a long period. This is the long look-ahead plan of known work.

      •Emergent work is subjected to daily scrutiny and appropriately prioritized.

      •Backlog