Chemical Company Case Study

We’reReliability Engineering going to go into a case study that demonstrates the results of the things that we just touched on in terms of reduced cost and release capacity. I’ll show you the technical and the non-technical components on the dashboard that we were keeping on this project.

My job is to set up and do the change management and set up the governance to engage the leadership team in that parallel organization that focuses on the initiative.

So, what we look at here, this is where they assessed. When we went and did the assessment, they were right there and they’re Regressive/Reactive state – fixing it after it breaks if we got the parts. Four-year-olds playing soccer, stay in your lane, stay in your lanes, put the ball in the goal.

After a year of implementing at Level 1, and then Level 2, we reassessed. They got to Experimenting, just ready to enter into the Planned State. At the end of year two, that’s where they are. And then again, we’re at the end of year three, probably a little bit further to the right. We did have some stagnation during the COVID, but they’re starting to pick up the wind and get some water going under the hole at this point, right now.

So, that was the journey for over the year from year one to year two. This is where they started in year one, Beginning State. That’s about on average where they were doing corrective repairs. And really, some technologies in place, not really anything applied based on a risk mitigation type of thing, other than “that’s a bad actor”, you know, “let’s watch that” kind of thing.

At the end of year one, we got them up to about right here on average. And at the end of year 2, they’re getting up to here.

So, we were getting better at identifying work early and getting it into the queue, and the work execution management processes were maturing and MRO, we were optimizing their spare parts as well. Because that typically is the long pole and making sure you got the right parts at the right time for the right pieces of critical equipment.

So, that was all going on in parallel and you can see the progress that was being made.

Here was the net benefit, at the end of year one was $10.8 million in terms of release capacity.

That was $6.4 million and then reduced or more efficient maintenance processes and maintenance costs. That translated into reductions in overtime and then a lot of contractor support that was non-specialty, like cranes and scaffolding.

Then, here’s the dashboard. Notice Change Management, all of that governance stuff was 100% complete. Then, Asset Health Assurance to criticality analysis, we’re going by process area by process area.

Bad Actor stabilizing. Bad actors don’t stabilize after you identify what’s going on to cause it. They stabilize when you start to take actions that are recommended from the original RCARoot Cause Analysis analysis.

Work Execution Management. You can see that they had nothing, now they’re getting moving towards that Planned State.

Lubrication Improvement started to get some big wins there in terms of stabilized assets, which translated into less unplanned downtime. Released capacity and then, over here, Spare Parts with 60%.

Then, at the end of year two, the overall net gain from year one to the end of year two was $14.3 million. Additional released capacity and reduction in costs.

At the end of year two, that’s where the dashboard was. The key enabler was the Change Management piece. That was in place in the first three to four months to create that cadence of accountability.

At about the six-to-seven-month phase, it was just monitoring now. They were up and running and managing themselves.

So, there’s a case study that shows how, when applied to both the technical part of the solution and the non-technical part of the solution, with an engaged leadership team, a parallel organization, that focuses the appropriate power structure on your asset reliability initiative, that leads to success.