At a Houston-area refinery, we recently worked with Reliability and Maintenance teams to balance and systematize their immediate reactive needs of today with a long-term proactive and structured system that’s sustainable.

Following a brief assessment, RLG and Reliability Department leadership co-developed a performance improvement plan to embed an Operating Rhythm^™ which:

• Emphasized their desired proactive culture, identified through specific activities which needed to occur, and in alignment with globally recognized maintenance and reliability best practices
• Allowed but controlled and measured reactive work, creating transparency and accountability, with an emphasis on long term continual improvement
• Created cross-functional collaboration while driving action to “finish what was started”

Starting with their Most Important Goals, a sequence of appropriate tools and processes were introduced to help guide appropriate decisions, discussions and behaviours.

Project Highlights

• Operating Rhythm™, structured problem solving with CI teams, leadership development, visual performance and leadership development were all introduced and coached to embed
• Focus, collaboration and recognition were all emphasized
• Equipment failure lost profit opportunity (LPO) was cut in half (saving $10s of millions)
• Mechanical availability improved achieve target value
• Bad actor program enhanced and more structured, identified $2 million in cost savings
• Pump train failures reduced 33%, to better than target