Refinery Operational Excellence
Leadership at this major USA refinery knew that increased refinery performance would come through greater clarity, coordination and risk mitigation from the office to and from the front line.
“Without RLG’s help, we wouldn’t have gotten here this quickly. With all the stuff going on, you helped us focus and get this to where it is now.”
— Refinery Manager
Context/Challenge
Refinery leadership recognized that more frequent, structured, and intentional conversations would drive needed clarity, coordination, and risk mitigation throughout their organization. To help them achieve this, they engaged RLG to build rigor into their operating performance practices.
Symptoms were:
- Performance Visibility: Operators had only a vague understanding of unit performance and even less visibility to data.
- Ineffective meetings: Meeting structure was haphazard, and most units weren’t using data to effectively drive discussions and decisions.
- Lack of Accountability: Action items lacked visibility and discipline, and the track record of follow-through was low.
- Performance gaps: Lackluster facility performance and low leadership morale led to a feeling of powerlessness.
Approach
RLG mobilized an experienced team to work within the refinery, across the front line in multiple units. Our goals was to work with leaders and teams to enable the right conversations for focus on the right things:
- Operating Rhythm: Structured, intentional, and frequent conversations designed and cascaded into all departments,
- Clarify processes and associated data: The introduction of collaborative process reviews and adjustments in roles and accountabilities,
- Unit Health Monitoring: Helping each leader to refine and stand up their health monitoring meeting cadence and use of safety and reliability risks, mitigating actions, performance metrics,
- Cascading Leadership: Establish boardwalks for visual stand-up performance to build effective two-way support and engagement between teams and leaders,
- Coaching for Effectiveness: One-on-one and within teams, coaches worked closely to support changing processes, roles and build leaders’ confidence and capability.
Result
This client acknowledged over $500 million in benefit from improved on-stream availability. Some of the key numbers included:
- 11% increase in on-stream availability during our implementation program, and a further 4% the year after, showing program sustainment.
- 7% reduction in recordable injury frequency – results and safety are interdependent.
- 8% reduction in loss of primary containment.
- 71% reduction in environmental reportable incidents.
- $180 million reduction in asset OPEX.
Altogether, this incredible result was the product of a bold leadership vision, a clear mission for the RLG team and site leaders, and emphasis on front line engagement.
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