BP Chemical and ABB Turn Reliability Initiative into Operational Excellence

Transcription

1 BP Chemical and ABB Turn Reliability Initiative into Operational Excellence Dan Glossner, Maintenance Manager, BP, Decatur, AL Glyn Thorman, Operations Manager, ABB Reliability Consulting NA High Reliability! At what cost? BP Chemical, Decatur AL had the enviable position of relatively high equipment reliability in a strong market with a good team of management and staff. (The Decatur Plant produces Paraxylene (PX), Purified Terephthalic Acid (PTA) and Naphthalene Dicarboxylate (NDC). These products are part of the Aromatics Acid family of products and are used in a variety of consumer products.) For the lost arts, the units are very mature chemical units, yet all of the units exhibited high reliability in a globally competitive commodity chemical market. Unfortunately, the reliability came at a cost well beyond where it should have been. The units were suffering from part replacement rather than part life extension. When equipment failed, it was simply another emergency job and another new part installed. To maintain the high reliability, a high percentage of the work was performed under an emergency status. Overtime was high, parts were hotshotted to the site and contractors easily picked up additional work often at overtime rates. The costs added up and in a global commodity market, even good reliability saddled with high costs equaled lower margins. If BP Decatur wished to stay competitive, lower maintenance and material costs were needed to augment the continuing reliability of its units. To achieve the desired financial performance, the reliability process would have to begin applying asset life extension rather than replacement. BP was also facing increasing global pressure from other regions, rising energy and feedstock costs and an aging workforce that would become increasingly impacted by retirements. Finally, as is often the case, maintenance investment reduction had become a path to improved profitability. program successfully implemented in Refining to determine where those opportunities were. Using a proprietary analysis titled, Accelerator, BP Decatur had a portion of what was needed. But the Accelerator did not have the advantage of a long history of other sites to benchmark to. Key measurements would need more depth to detail the extent of opportunities and what should be expected. Shortly after the decision was made to supplement Accelerator, BP Decatur contacted ABB s Reliability Services consulting division. Armed with an assessment tool, WCR (World Class Reliability), ABB was able to bring a refined 30 year product to the table. The tool not only provided additional measurement opportunities but would also compare BP Decatur to hundreds of other industrial sites. BP Decatur now had the Accelerator and the WCR Assessment tools to pin-point cost-cutting and reliability improvement areas. After spending much of the spring and summer developing the scope of the assessment and building a business case, BP and ABB conducted a joint assessment of Decatur s Maintenance and Reliability performance. The assessment took four weeks and in November 2006, the assessment team issued the results of the Decatur assessment. Both the Accelerator and the WCR Assessment were aligned on the focus needed by the site. Using scores and improvement opportunities, BP Decatur identified several key gaps to focus on as improvement initiatives. The elements to address the gaps were as follows: 1. Develop a site wide Maintenance and Reliability Strategy 2. Re-establish the Work Management Process. 3. Place reliability on a best practice status with a fenceto-fence application. 4. Streamline the parts process from Stores to Delivery Points. 5. Evaluate better management practices for contractor control. 6. Establish metrics to measure improvement and success. The Assessment Working to improve costs and keep or improve reliability required an inventory of where the opportunities were. Time and budgets did not permit a wide shotgun betterment approach. What was needed was a targeted approach that would provide the best return on the investment. In early 2006, efforts began to identify how the site could improve maintenance and reliability performance through improved execution of documented processes, while maintaining a cost competitive position. BP Decatur contacted the BP Refining group to learn more of a

2 effect, maintenance coordinators would be responsible for the schedule, schedule compliance and PM attainment. TOTAL PLANT RELIABILITY Total Plant Reliability Process People Equipment/T Measurement Cap. Project & Performance RCM /RBI Block Diagram Material Mgt Multi-Skills LCC Reliability Data Contractors Mgt ODR Standardization Customer Scheduling Team Predictive Tasks Training Planning Roles & Resp. Basic PM Financials BOM Org. structure Criticality Business Work Vision & Mission Failure Bad Actors Asset Management Empowerment Prevention Reliability BusinessManagement ProcessesandAlignment World Class Reliability Benchmark Industry Best Practices Figure # 1 - Sample Base Assessment Re-establish Work Management BP Decatur was using SAP yet the process for moving work through the system had disconnects. The plant went through a period of time when the maintenance execution and support functions became distanced from the reliable, cost effective requirements of the production group. The plant had a planning and scheduling department. A a lead planner and the team were centrally organized as a separate entity from the operations department. Maintenance execution personnel were also independent of operations. To capture the benefits of the Accelerator and WCR efforts, it became clear that changes were needed in the maintenance structure. A new Maintenance Manager position was created. The Maintenance Manager was given overall responsibility for Maintenance Excellence. The routine maintenance department was decentralized and placed within the operating units, reporting to a Maintenance Superintendent who is a part of the Operations Leadership Team. In addition, core maintenance technician positions that had been outsourced to contractors as a means to cost minimization were re-filled by BP personnel. However, the planning group, contractor management and Stores remained under the direction of the new Maintenance Manager. 2. Schedules would be assembled and monitored by the planners. A new scheduling tool was created using Microsoft Access that allowed easy selection of work and also tracked completion. This tool was developed by the Lead Planner over the course of several months and significantly improved the complexity of scheduling multiple crafts, decentralized over three major production areas. Weekly/daily scheduling meetings would be rearranged to allow planners to attend their representative meetings. Daily meetings would focus on work selection from the weekly plan. 3. Break-in work (emergency and urgent) would follow new rules of engagement. Priority fields were reestablished and the prior RIME system of work criticality would be an advisory tool rather than an abused method of forcing unplanned work into the schedule. Under the new process, operations, via maintenance coordinators, would select what work would be on the schedule and, what work would break the schedule. Within the same guidelines, operations would be responsible for overtime and the associated costs. 4. At the time the assessment was conducted, each individual process unit was executing the Maintenance Work Process in their own unique manner. As part of the new process, there would now be one way to execute the process across the site. By clearly reviewing how work flows and who is responsible along each step, the planning, scheduling and work completion element at BP Decatur moved to a higher level of performance. Maintenance coordinators now felt as owners of the process and of schedule compliance. Break-in work was considered evil and no longer viewed as the norm. As the process progressed, backlogs declined and the amount of work completed under a planned status improved. BP Decatur was clearly getting more work done and was in fact, running low on work to do. By bringing the backlog down, risk was also lowered as repairs were being made before continuing decay lead to an emergency and subsequent loss of run time. Early on, a Focus Group was formed of planners, maintenance coordinators, and maintenance foremen. Under their consensus, a new, well defined, work flow process was established. The flow included specific roles and responsibilities including: 1. Maintenance Coordinators as weekly/daily scheduling meeting leaders. The coordinators would be responsible for the selection of work both for the weekly and daily schedules. Schedules would match available resources and include PM completion. In

3 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 Feb- Mar- BP Backlog Hours - All Crafts Apr- May- Jun- Jul- Aug- Sep- Oct- Nov- Dec- Figure # 2 - Reduction of Backlog Hours 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% BP Decatur Emergency and Urgent Priority Work Jul- Aug- Sep- Oct- Nov- Dec- Jan-08 Feb-08 Mar-08 Emergency Urgent Linear (Emergency) Linear (Urgent ) Figure # 3 - Reduction of Break-In Work Place Reliability on a Best Practice Status BP Decatur had numerous mechanical and electrical engineers for maintenance, project and reliability efforts. Unfortunately, the engineers were scattered and it was a well known fact that the bulk of work was project (capital) jobs. Common measurements such as MTBF and common failure examinations such as RCFA were not key to anyone s agenda. Rather than pursue an excellence in maintenance and reliability, the site had moved to a replace or upgrade mentality. Prior years of low capital reinvestment resulted in asset improvement initiatives that had lingered and become the solution for equipment degradation. Currently, maximizing equipment life and targeting the cause of failures was not the ideal when replacement was so easily obtained. Although there were shinning stars of best practice, most of the true reliability work was done in a vacuum and behind the scenes. A fence-to-fence application of best practices across all three production units was not pursued. were committing 60%+ of their labor resource for PM work, averaged over an entire year. Not only were potential good PMs not being done, but the maintenance work force was engulfed with potential marginal PMs thus driving up the need for contractors. And that drove up the cost of maintenance. To address these issues (reinforced by results of the Accelerator and WCR examination) the Maintenance Manager organized an Equipment Reliability Focus Team. Engineers from the units and from various practices met and were given the following tasks to accomplish: 1. Develop a methodology to add or delete PMs. This would a documented process that insured new or old PMs would be addressed and agreed to before action was taken. 2. Identify the bad actors and critical equipment for PM evaluations. Delete, modify and add steps where necessary. (This is a multi-year process.) 3. New PMs would only be created when a clearly identifiable link existed for its intended purpose regulatory, safety, environmental, equipment life, production consequences, etc. 4. A clear owner of the PM process was identified. The Unit Maintenance Foreman is the single point of accountability for all PM requests. Anyone wishing to add, delete or modify a PM, including Project Engineers associated with new equipment installations, has to go through the Maintenance Foreman to create or modify a PM. To date the recently formed team is continuing with reliability issues as outlined above. It is planned for several of the engineers to focus entirely on tracking failures and improving reliability and the subsequent reduction of equipment repairs and early replacement. Another key objective is to establish requirements for the documentation of maintenance work, including identification of failure causes, so that better equipment history can be used for reliability analysis. Over the years, numerous pieces of equipment were installed without the accompanying PM routines being established. Other PMs remained unchanged over the years yet perhaps were producing minimal additional asset life. New PMs when added were done by almost anyone with little procedure. In the end, some of the maintenance crews

4 100% 95% 90% 85% 80% 75% 70% 65% 60% 55% 50% 1/21/2008 1/28/2008 BP Decatur PPM Schedule Compliance 2/4/2008 2/11/2008 Figure # 4 - PM Schedule Compliance Stores and Inventory 2/18/2008 2/25/2008 3/3/2008 3/10/2008 Parts are a key component of any planned work and a compliment for reliability. The balance is to have the right parts, at the right time yet not be over-stock. BP Decatur had a well-run Stores but in some cases, too well run. A delivery system was in place, outside vendors provided many of the parts on a JIT basis and accuracy was in the high level of acceptance. However, a maintenance effort often does not thrive on a very well run Stores entity. By using outside suppliers and keeping inventory at very low levels and for emergency use only, needed parts were often delayed in arrival. What resulted was triple orders one to satisfy the order, one for replenishment and another part hot-shotted in to meet a schedule. The order and replenish process eventually filled the order but the part sat waiting for delivery instructions that never came. The expedited part was used to fill the order and the kit became obsolete. As the Maintenance Work Flow team was moving through their implementation, it became increasingly clear that the materials management activities needed to be addressed. BP Decatur made the decision to have Stores a dedicated entity to maintenance rather than s stand-alone cost center. The goal would be the right parts delivered at the right time and yes, there would be occasional issues with slow-turning parts or parts for cancelled jobs. Before enacting a new process, the Maintenance Manager established a small team composed of the Stores Manager, the SAP Inventory Manager and the Lead Planner. They would be tasked with the following assignment: would address additional issues including physical layout and staging. Their efforts would be concentrated on: 1. Procedures for assembling kitted parts, delivery of parts and the return of parts. Previous kitting had taken place at a remote location, away from Stores and operated by contractors. This location required parts from Stores to be delivered prior to being kitted and re-delivered to the units. The team insisted that kitting be moved to the Stores. Now all kits would be assembled where many of the parts were already located. Delivery would take place from Stores as well. New kitting procedures included not releasing kits until complete, all kitted parts would be placed in bins, and bins would be clearly marked and include parts list, delivery location and a return tag. The newly devised return tag would be used anytime a part needed to be returned. The tag was designed to be very simple to use and required minimal information such as why the part was coming back. All the members of the group decided that while parts could go back for any reason, once received by Stores, the parts could be dealt with as necessary including disposal. Special order parts could not be returned to Stores but had to be returned by the units themselves. Parts taken from vendor-supplied free stock shelves would be returned there. 2. Locations for delivery and return. Each of the area units were tasked with locating space for shelving to be used for delivery and for return of kitted parts. These shelves were marked and separated as such. In some areas a 5-S was performed to make room for the shelves to begin with. All parts in bins would be delivered and returns made, from these locations. Larger parts would be on pallets and delivered to pallet designated space. Extra large parts would be staged in an off-unit location and delivered near to the work date. 3. Physical equipment required including delivery area shelving, kit tubs and documents for easy return of extra or unused parts. Sturdy shelving, reusable kitting tubs and the previous mentioned documents were all part of the kitting/delivery process. All the components were required for the kitting process to be successful. The Focus Group covered all aspects required of the process and the program was begun in short order. 1. Map a flow process for all parts on the site including where the parts are located during different stages of the process. Whether from vendors or from Stores shelves, the parts would be located in specific areas as they were received, stored, kitted or delivered. 2. Establish the correct protocol for parts ordering by planners. In addition, a Materials Focus Group comprised of planners, maintenance foremen, and Stores personnel

5 Material Return Request 1. Circle parts to be returned on Material List. 2. Check the reason for the return on this from. 3. Place Return Request form and Material List with part(s) in kitting tub. 4. (Do not return parts from shop inventory or special order parts.) occupants. As such, the group looked at the entire area and made recommendations for all entities and their equipment. No one was homeless and the relocation process occurred quickly. Please check reason for return: Job was cancelled. Correct part or model number is: Job is to be rescheduled. Please hold in kitting. 7. Reviews of vendor agreements with Purchasing and a clarification of vendor expectations. Correct parts but kit included extra part not needed or used. Correct parts on Material List but wrong parts received. Incorrect parts on Material List for this application. Job was performed with another MO. Other: Thank you for helping get you the right parts at the right time! Figure # 5 - Material Return Request form 4. Vendor consignment stocking of low cost items. Vendor supplied free stock inventory (low cost or high usage parts) had been tried in past years but had failed from an unsuccessful consolidation effort by two vendors. The errors of the previous program were compared with the potential benefit and the decision was made to again try to establish vendor supplied free stock in limited areas. Representative craft foremen developed a list of parts to be vendor supplied and circulated the list for acceptance. The two locations selected for stocking were prepared and in some cases required a cascading move of contents and prior purpose to another location. Free stock areas and a gasket area were given priority. Other inhabitants and equipment would be relocated. 5. Free stock inventory and locations. In several instances, commonly used parts were part of an enclosed and staffed area for tools. These parts included simple items such as bolts and fittings. The Focus Group decided such parts should be located near work areas and be free to use without paperwork or attendant assistance. In other areas, additional free stock was added to what was available. Planners would prepare kits knowing what was located already in the shops. If a job required numerous numbers of the same part, the quantity would be part of the kit and not deplete the shop s free stock. In many cases, free stock inventory actually became vendor consignment stocked free stock. All areas containing free stock were deemed limited access and restricted to the shop s personnel only. Contractors, capital project crews or other maintenance unit crews would have access only with permission of the shop s foremen. Over the years, vendor agreements for securing and the delivery of parts became less observed. Vendors failed to observe minimum delivery times, and required stocked parts were back-ordered. Purchasing supplied a member to the Focus group, agreements were reviewed and contacts and meetings were held with key vendors to review prior agreements. In most cases, vendor s agreed to comply and meet the requirements of BP Decatur. Contractor Control As with many industrial sites, BP Decatur employed contractors. Many worked under one resident company, although several additional providers were also used. One sub-group of the resident contractors was titled attached and worked solely in each of the units they were assigned, in conjunction with the proprietary BP workforce. The primary objective of the attached group was to supplement the BP workforce with skills deemed non-core. Another group from the same company was centralized and primarily executed capital projects. In evaluating the efficiency of the contractors who were all under the management of the Maintenance Manager, it was determined that better controls needed to be in place. As one group of attached contractors was reduced to reflect improved maintenance efficiencies, an equal amount of new faces would appear in another attached group or in the capital group. In addition, each project engineer or maintenance foreman was free to use whatever contractor they desired. The end result was that there was no clear coordination of contractors used in the site. A small Action Team reviewed these practices and better controls were put into place. Additions or deletions from any group would now require notification to the maintenance department s contract management group. Secondly, the Action Team now meets on a monthly basis to review proposed contractor staffing needs across the site, in order to maximize the effectiveness of a smaller number of contractors. 6. Physical relocations of space to accommodate the above. The entire shift of space in many cases triggered a domino effect as high priority recommendations took over space. The Focus Group recognized that taking a space would be resisted if a new space was not secured for the former

6 Backlog Wks. Mx Expenses $ Contractor Maintenance Labor Expense (major turnaround months in orange) Backlog Age % MTBF - Pumps Mo. Dollars $1,200,000 $1,000,000 $800,000 $600,000 $400,000 $200,000 Figure # 6 - Contractor Reductions Future and continuing work in this area will lead to even better rules for engaging the contract work force. Metrics $0 Jan- Feb- Mar- Apr- May- Jun- Jul- Aug- Sep- Oct- Nov- Dec- Jan-08 Feb-08 Mar-08 Measurements for gauging success begin with capturing key metrics. The challenge at BP Decatur was two-fold and included: 1. Metrics that were based on incorrect or invalid information; and 2. Metrics that did not isolate where the problems lied. To provide better measurements, and to address some past behavioral issues, all of the units were told in the plant that metrics would not be used as a personal success/failure tool but rather a measurement of improvement. Regardless as to where the performance level of a unit or team may be, importance would be placed on improvement and not on immediate attainment of best class numbers. To seek otherwise would only result in massaged or manipulated numbers. As the teams began to see the numbers, this concept and belief was reinforced. In addition, metrics were linked and the manipulation of one metric would often show up as a poor metric in another measurement. For example, a high degree of schedule attainment would be compared with the percentage of resources scheduled to begin with. It would be no longer wise to schedule a small number of resources in order to meet a high degree of schedule attainment. Schedule Compliance % Overtime $ PM Completion % Contractor Head Count # Resource Alignment % Inventory Accuracy % Planned Backlog % Inventory Stockouts # One-Man Jobs % Inventory Value $ Job Priority % PM/PdM Finds $ Figure # 7 - Selected KPIs A plant with several major units, each containing at least two craft teams, has the possibility of 8 measurements for each metric followed. As these measurements were rolled up to unit management, the shear number of metrics and their corresponding graphs multiplied. To determine which were the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), a team was asked to review not only which measurements were critical to follow but also how and where to present them. This team is continuing with the selection process today and beginning to provide both detailed yet comprehensive recommendations. Summary BP Decatur looked to reducing its cost to provide good reliability by challenging how work was performed, who would perform it, what services would be supportive and what measurements would tell of improvements. Combined with this effort, the reliability goal of actual work reduction through better reliability practices across the plant was being pursued. As the plant attains these goals, costs are being reduced while reliability is being increased. In a highly competitive global market, to reach for less would be to accept economic risk.