Petrochemical plants that adopt Lean Thinking principles are seeing transformative improvements in asset performance and reliability. These improvements are not only faster but also more sustainable, with longer intervals between performance dips. Two foundational principles of Lean Thinking, eliminating waste and empowering people, are proving especially powerful.
Twelve petrochemical plants have already leveraged Lean Thinking successfully to increase their competitive advantage, setting a benchmark for others in the industry.
The plants that are achieving top-quartile results in performance and reliability are focusing their Lean transformations across Four Key Lean Pillars:
- Removing barriers and constraints for employees and contractors
- Leaders Driving Improvements with Visual Management
- Implementing Pull and Kanban Techniques
- Creating a Team-Based Improvement Culture
1. Removing barriers and constraints for employees and contractors
In many petrochemical plants, maintenance craftspeople begin their day only to discover that one in every three work orders is constrained by missing parts, conflicting schedules, or lack of readiness—resulting in wasted time. This inefficiency persists even in companies that have invested millions in computer maintenance management systems (CMMS) and advanced scheduling software that are supposed to automate everything in the core workflow.
Operations are frequently blamed for maintenance constraints, but often they are not aware if or when maintenance is planning to show up. They are often having to choose between running the unit and supporting maintenance.
Teams are empowered to eliminate these constraints by implementing Lean Thinking concepts of daily visual management, quality at the source, structured problem-solving, and 5S.
Top performing companies benefit from a tightly run maintenance workflow that has a high responsive capability for equipment upkeep, while being able to find the right balance between preventive and corrective work. These organizations are also quite skilled at tracking and resolving constraints to execution and selecting the right front-line metrics while also making a concerted effort in coaching front-line leaders to install effective daily performance dialogues that sets the right expectations for work execution.
2. Leaders Driving Improvements with Visual Management
EFESO’s experience shows that many plants are hindered by a leadership gap. People are getting promoted based on their technical skills and time on the job and not their ability to lead teams. Additionally, the burden of managing the day-to-day administrative duties and meetings has increased. Our research shows that only 20 percent of front-line supervisors engage in true leadership activities—those that involve coaching, mentoring, and helping teams hit daily goals. The rest are stuck expediting tasks or attending to urgent issues. Our definition of true leadership is when leaders are actively coaching, mentoring, and providing constructive feedback to their teams to help them achieve their daily targets and goals. Combined with effective visual management to make the team accountable and to demonstrate progress and successes the process becomes very effective.
When it comes to leading continuous improvement, our study shows that less than 5% of front-line supervisors are leading their teams to eliminate wastes, improve processes, or innovate work practices. Anchoring leader behaviors in enabling supervisors to apply leadership skills to achieve breakthrough improvement will result in the growth of leaders and workforce performance. Once a supervisor has led their team to successfully sustain, they increase their credibility and ability to influence for future change. We believe in the 70/20/10 model of learning where 70% of learning is achieved through doing, 20% is from being coached, 10% is from formal in-class training.
3. Implementing Pull and Kanban Techniques
The traditional weekly maintenance scheduling model is no longer adequate in today’s fast-moving plant environments. A schedule published on Thursday often fails to reflect changing priorities by Monday. In most cases, only 30 to 40 percent of the scheduled work is executed by the following Wednesday. This breakdown stems from reliance on a push system in which work orders are issued without regard to real-time conditions on the plant floor. Such systems create inefficiency, encourage expediting, and misallocate resources.
The alternative is a pull system. The main advantage of a pull system is that work orders are “pulled” through the system according to the capacity of the downstream work to prevent the waste of over-production of work orders before they are executable. At a high level, Operations and Maintenance leaders meet daily to pull work for the next day from the “ready to execute queue” and self-optimize the work orders to maximize productivity. Maintenance supervisors have a comparative advantage in that they know their teams’ capabilities and the equipment, and they can see pull work in the same area in the plant. As the work is pulled it is confirmed with Operations.
The resulting output is amazing. Communication and collaboration increase, work flows faster, and there are less constraints in the field. The average cycle time to complete a work order from notification to work completion improves by 30 to 50%. Work orders completed versus work orders created goes from negative to positive, and backlog is reduced. Risk is reduced as the most important work is being completed according to the target completion times.
Even though it is well accepted that both maintenance and operations need to be active players in the daily management of workflow for effective execution, in many organizations, this harmonic balance for the ownership of equipment and accountability of execution is less that desired, resulting in a poorly managed backlog, increasing risk, and higher repair costs. A pull system allows for maximum transparency of the workflow and a laser focused effort to optimize flow and resources.
4. Creating a Team-Based Improvement Culture
We find that organizations have different operating models related to which group or individuals drive the workflow execution. There are some where planning and scheduling areas set the daily priorities, in others, it is the maintenance department, in others it is operations, and in other cases it is done in a survival mode, hour-by-hour, according to the emergencies and events of the day or week.
Every plant wants their employees to act and perform like a team. Many may say they have organized their maintenance into area-based teams or unit-based teams versus centralized maintenance organizations. True team-based maintenance maximizes communication and collaboration. Team-based maintenance takes this a step further by blending area-based teams with Lean Thinking.
Team-Based-Maintenance focuses on increasing communication and collaboration to reduce/eliminate waste and white spaces. From the customer’s perspective, this results in reduced unplanned downtime decrease (flow efficiency) and maintenance crafts that are being utilized optimally (resource efficiency).
Another benefit of Team-Based-Maintenance is optimizing resources within each team. Each team has core resources that are subject matter experts in the equipment. There are also pooled resources that are developing their skills that can flex between teams. Just like the Lean Thinking concept of cellular work design, when extra resources are needed the team can increase in size by adding pooled resources and reduce resources when the demand decreases.
As workflow becomes more efficient, backlog shrinks, freeing up resources to focus on value-added initiatives that improve equipment reliability. EFESO has found that 80% of reliability issues are better solved within the team communication and coordination of operations and maintenance, allowing reliability to focus on reducing risk and threats.
Just like in team sports, the teams that have accountability to each other win championships. In Team-Based-Maintenance the use of a Ready-For-Maintenance Operator is closely connected to the operators running the unit and can provide real-time feedback when it comes to constraints, defects and running the equipment correctly.
As Brook Vickery, Vice President and Manufacturing Manager at Flint Hills Resources, puts it, “It’s amazing to me the incredible results that can be achieved by empowering your team to act and applying these concepts”.
Conclusion
Refinery Leadership Teams are being challenged to further improve their asset availability and productivity levels while finding new ways to improve and sustain performance in an environment of rapidly changing workforce and skill levels. These teams are having a difficult time finding ways to engage and energize team members, as well as measuring and tracking this journey towards excellence while buried in a mountain of data from CMMS systems.
EFESO’s unique Lean approach seeks to start from the basics of waste elimination in the workflow while gradually transitioning to a more advanced methods to manage flow and resources. The secret is to empower the front-line teams to determine a realistic method to measure their performance, to find waste and to learn to implement daily structured problem-solving. A new wave of Lean that stresses people, not tools, and drives accountability and flow from the people that do the work is particularly powerful as part of this imperative to optimize asset management.
To learn more about how EFESO can help your plant implement Lean Maintenance and Reliability methods, contact us
Authors
Jorge Mastellari, Senior Partner
CJ Renegar, Partner