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

useful in the business world, asset values are not a particularly useful basis for intersite comparison worldwide.

      •Volumetric divisors. Divisors such as intake quantities may reflect the size of a facility, but they do not make allowance for downstream costs of operating added-value processes, i.e., complexity/conversion factors. One leading consultant uses an Equivalent Distillation Capacity (EDC) which attempts to relate size and complexity. Many people express reservations about this methodology. It is rather artificial and difficult to sell the EDC concept to middle management and supervision as a motivating tool. People can see barrels, but not EDC. However, it has become widely used and accepted in management circles

      •Complexity indices. These indices, which use the amount of equipment, are liked by engineers as they can easily visualize these as maintenance workload. By giving suitable weightings, these can be made to correlate with other normalization factors. These tend not to have credibility in fields outside engineering

      •Replacement Value (RV). This is a popular divisor. Values show wide differences between similar plants located in different regions. UK and Japan show significantly higher replacement values than Continental Europe and Australia.

      •In Australia, the RVs are deliberately kept as low as is believable because the local authorities use them to determine local taxes.

      •When derived for insurance purposes, there is an equally powerful drive for minimization, as long as it is believable.

      •One consultant calculates an estimated replacement value(RV) for each process facility considered in their studies. Although the methodology is proprietary, their RVs are almost directly proportional to their EDC values. We found at the time that they were approximately 60% of our company’s quoted RVs. Possibly this is because of their simplification of ignoring facilities such as their own utilities and generation, and assuming optimized size of tank farms, jetties, pipelines, and other peripheral activities. The valuations seem to be based on modern designs and technology; this penalizes the older plants with their piece meal modifications over the years.

      8-B.3 Concluding Thoughts

      Each divisor has some advantages (easy availability) and disadvantages (varying degrees of inaccuracy).

      As a leading benchmarking firm once remarked, “A dog is a dog however you measure it!”

      Reality brings us to three divisors:

      1.Intake barrels per day as it is immediately available and free; but the answers should be viewed with caution.

      2.Equivalent Distillation Capacity (EDC) as it is becoming widely adopted in the refining world.

      3.Replacement Values, but see the caveats below:

      •They should not be too influenced by insurance, financial, or rating considerations.

      •The traditional method of escalating original as-built costs, using published international construction indices, should be used with caution as the final values can be unevenly distorted and defeat their purpose.

      •The calculation should take reasonable account of standard and special-process plants, utilities, off-sites including major pipelines and jetties, and offices.

      PART 3: PEOPLE

Chapter 9

       Staffing Levels

       Only those who will risk going too far will ever know how far they can go.

       T.S. Eliot, Author.

      Author: Jim Wardhaugh

       Location: 2.3.3 Corporate Technical Headquarters

      9.1 Background

      When I first started work, I had no computer and I shared a telephone with six other engineers. I had a real-time information service in the form of an engineering clerk; I also had over a hundred employees with a bevy of foremen. As I progressed through my career, I have acquired a computer and a telephone of my own. I lost my real-time engineering clerk and the number of people reporting to me has shrunk every year. Indeed for most of my career, how many people I could get rid of each year and still get the job done seemed to be the most important factor in setting my salary increase.

      What I have learned over the years about staffing levels is that: