Hercules
Client:
The competitive pressures of globalization pushed this chemical plant to achieve a breakthrough in its asset utilization. Furthermore, this chemical plant is listed as one of the plants which are required to accord with the new environmental, health & safety regulations, as recently issued by the Dutch government.
Industry:
Chemie
Description
Having a well functioning maintenance and inspection process is one of the key requirements in aligning with the environmental, health & safety regulations. Based on this requirement and the challenge to increase the asset utilization with 10 %, the management decided to focus the improvement efforts on increasing the reliability of the installations within the plant and the development of an organizational structure in the maintenance department focused on autonomous teams.
Solution
Past efforts of the maintenance and inspection department had been focused on building upon and fully utilizing the expertise of its employees and the management of the maintenance related costs. A longer term vision of how the maintenance department could fully support the production process in terms of maximizing asset utilization was lacking.
Based on an initial assessment, improvement priorities were selected with a focus on the future reorientation and organization of the maintenance department, and the design of new processes related to work order registration, scheduling and execution.
Methodology
On a technical side, installations were no longer regarded as one unit, but split into several vital components. This facilitated the process of managing and executing the maintenance efforts according to criticality and moving from a corrective approach to a preventive and predictive maintenance approach.
The change process of reorienting the maintenance department towards a team based organization was based upon the TAO methodology. The TAO methodology is a unique, integrated and well-tested approach developed by Stanwick to assess and implement team based organizations. Improving Teamwork, increasing the Autonomy and guiding the Organization in the right direction were simultaneous efforts taken to succeed in the goal of installing autonomous teams within the maintenance department, and also afterwards in the production department.
Results
Setting up autonomous teams resulted in an increased level of ownership and intrapreneurship within the departments.
The Dutch governing body, entrusted with the enforcement of the new environmental, health & safety regulations, praised the installation of the new maintenance and inspection processes, as well as the organizational change towards more empowerment.
The required increase in asset utilization has been realized, and an investment to add further capacity was recently granted to this plant.
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