The road to reliability
| Paul V. Arnold |
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"I read Reliable Plant magazine's articles on companies
that have achieved a high level of excellence and payback in the area of
reliability. I've had a vision of Century Aluminum someday being on the cover of
your magazine ... in three or so years. But, perha ps now is the time for a
story about a company in great need of reliability improvement - one that
realizes the need, has the want-to and has made the decision to embark on the
journey. It's kind of a crazy idea, but maybe it is time."
- e-mail from Lowell Pistelli, Century Aluminum's corporate reliability
excellence manager, to Reliable Plant in February 2008
It is time.
It is time to offer up just such an organization as a role model, as a hope,
for all of the traditional manufacturing plants that fight tooth and nail each
day to keep the machines running and get product out the door. These traditional
plants constitute the majority in the U.S. industrial sector. Plants that are
best in class in the area of reliability - the Toyotas, Cargills, Eli Lillys,
DuPonts, etc. - are the minority. The traditionals, for a variety of reasons,
face an uphill battle in their efforts to be competitive and viable. They must
work twice as hard to make half the progress of best-in-class plants.
There comes a time, after many years of firefighting, forced overtime and
"dealing with it", when a traditional plant longs for something more ... and
decides to take action. This is an important step in the reliability maturation
process, and it's one not everyone feels comfortable taking. Plants with the
guts and the wherewithal to take it are worthy of praise and, in this case, a
magazine cover story.
"We want to be a reliable plant," says Scott Carte, the reliability
excellence facilitator for Century Aluminum's smelting plant in Ravenswood,
W.Va. "When you are reliable, you keep good data so you can make good decisions.
You don't shut down production. You have planned time to fix things before they
hurt you. You eliminate the sources of failures. You are valued - not by the way
that you react to fires, but by the manner in which you prevent them."
Progress begins with a long, hard look in the mirror and the ability, the
openness, to talk about what you see.
"We have to be open about it," says Carte. "The first step is admitting that
you have a problem."
It is the symbolic "line in the sand" that separates where you have been and
where you want to be.
Jeff Carpenter (left) and Linda Sibley prepare to hoist a
motor.
Photos by Ed Connors, Ed's Photogenics
Fully reactive maintenance. Frequent breakdowns. A lack of data and equipment
history. Band-Aid repairs. Skewed recognition and compensation. Finger-pointing.
No time for planning, scheduling, preventive maintenance, predictive
maintenance, and implementation and utilization of root cause activities.
Century Aluminum has been there and done that. It is a part of its past, and it
is moving on.
REASONS FOR REACTIVE The Ravenswood
plant celebrated its 50th year of operation in 2007, but maintenance and
production workers will tell you '07 also marked another golden anniversary.
"Fifty years of being in a reactive mode," remarks millwright Paul Roach, who
has worked at the site for 10 years. "I think the plant was pretty much set up
from the beginning on more of a reactive basis."
Plant manager Jim Chapman agrees.
The plant employs 175 maintenance workers, including 150
in skilled trades positions.
Photos by Ed Connors, Ed's Photogenics
"What we have done for the past 50 years is work in a breakdown mentality,"
he says. "That is the way they have been trained and that is what the
expectation has been."
The reasons behind that relate to, among other things:
Size: Ravenswood is a low-amperage smelter (currently 93 kiloamps)
trying to compete against smelters backed by three or four times the power. The
thinking was that hustle could make up for muscle.
A focus on quotas: "We've considered it more of a production plant,"
says millwright Linda Sibley, who has worked at the site for 32 years. "The
philosophy has been, 'It's what goes out the door that counts. It's not how well
the machinery is running. Get it running long enough to get it out the door, to
reach the quota for the day.'"
Perceived excellence: "We're good at reactive maintenance," says
Roach. "When it's an emergency, we shine."
Dollars and sense: "We thought we were saving money by not spending it
on the equipment," says Carte.
The reality, in retrospect, has proved otherwise. Health and viability are
components of working smarter, not harder. It is indeed about how well the
machinery is running. Reactive greatness only gets you so far. And, total cost -
good or bad - will always matter most. (Remember the line from the old Fram oil
filter ads: "You can pay me now or you can pay me later"?)
Electrician Clyde Whitney has worked 32 years at the
plant.
CLEARING THE AIR Examining past
practices and habits can be similar to cleaning out your attic at home. It's
important to go through every box and determine what to keep and what to throw.
What doesn't fit anymore? What's old and outdated? What makes you say, "What was
I thinking?" The process, and the resulting conversations, can be quite
cathartic.
It's OK to question. It's OK to vent. It's OK to admit ...:
• "When your whole day is centered on saving the world,
it's hard to get much accomplished." - Jack Payne, millwright and 10-year plant
veteran
Reactive work has constituted nearly all of the maintenance department's time
and attention, especially in the last 15 years when the plant shifted into what
employees call "survival mode."
In this environment, you can't plan.
"We started adding planners again three years ago," says maintenance planner
Todd Harrison. "The previous ones had transitioned into other roles. We now have
three planners for 150 maintenance tradesmen. We have done some planning, but
when you are in such a reactive mode, it's next to impossible to do much
planning. It's all about putting out fires."
You can't do much preventive work.
"You try to stay on the preventive maintenance schedule, but you don't have a
chance to do the PMs because of all the emergencies," says Clyde Whitney, an
electrician for the past 32 years.
You can't review and rationalize the PMs.
"Probably one-third of the PMs are no good," says maintenance manager Jim
Doeffinger, who has worked at the plant since 1980. "We waste time doing
irrelevant PMs. We need time to go through them all."
• "Everybody is tired of the Band-Aid effect. It's
'put a Band-Aid on it, get it up and get it running.' The biggest need is to
have the time, personnel and materials to fix stuff right." - John Wilson,
equipment operator and 20-year vet
Century Aluminum's Ravenswood site is situated adjacent
to the Ohio River.
Managers and skilled trades personnel will tell you that the pinch and the
protocol have had nothing to do with a lack of desire or skills.
"People want to fix things right," says Carte. "It frustrates and disappoints
them when they have to patch and do repairs that they know won't be a permanent
fix."
Adds Whitney, "The two main ingredients are the manpower and the materials.
It's not a matter of skills or knowledge. It's a matter of means."
• "We do some root cause, but it's all after the
fact, and then what do we do with it? 'This is why it failed.' Great. What are
you going to do to change it? 'I don't know. I just wanted to know why it
failed.' It didn't change anything." - Doeffinger
The quote sheds light on a shortfall of many traditional plants. It's
important to have information. But it's much more important to be able to do
something with it - to be able to turn info into proactive battle plans. The
Ravenswood plant admittedly has struggled with maintenance information. Part of
that stems from the fact that mechanics are often nabbed by production employees
to make on-the-spot repairs. Little of that impromptu work gets captured.
Another facet is that the plant has gone through three computerized maintenance
management software systems (a legacy system, a dedicated CMMS and a component
of an enterprise-wide system) in recent years. Doeffinger says a big share of
equipment history has been lost in the shuffle.
"We aren't even putting tickets in for some stuff right now, so you don't
know what work is being done by some people," says Carte. "We hardly have any
data at this point, so we don't have a history of what's been going on. What
failures have we worked on in the past? Is it giving us clues to what will be
coming up? What failures have been occurring? What was the root cause or causes
of those failures?"
• "The relationship between maintenance and
production has been poor ... to the point of cussing each other out." -
Carte
Again, it comes down to frustration with the traditional setup and the hustle
and bustle of trying to get product out the door. Add in the fact that a smelter
is a tough place in which to work - it's exceptionally hot and far from a
cleanroom environment - and tempers are bound to flare.
"It's a waste of time to point fingers now and say, 'It's maintenance's
fault' or 'It's production's fault,'" says Roach. "Everyone is to blame. We are
all in this together."
THE SEEDS OF SUCCESS We are all in this
together. That is the nature of Century Aluminum's road to reliability. The past
is the past. Let bygones be bygones. Rip off the Band-Aid, even though you know
it will sting (and probably pull out some hairs). What happens now impacts and
involves everyone.
Plants that seek to address reliability fail most of the time when their
efforts are created or viewed as a maintenance department initiative. You may
get some surface improvements, but the impact is neither substantial nor
lasting. Century Aluminum was cognizant of this when, in the summer of 2007, it
decided that change was necessary in order to have a future in Ravenswood and in
the global aluminum market.
"We tried change in the past with just maintenance, but it only goes so far,"
says Carte. "It doesn't work. You aren't developing, educating, making people
aware on the production side. They aren't part of it at all, so what do they
have in it? If they don't see the results of it, they definitely aren't in it.
This is the only way that it can be. It has to be total alignment."
Plant manager Chapman agrees.
"When you say 'reliability,' everybody thinks 'maintenance'," he says. "We
got together and discussed this. Some of our pitfalls in the past have been that
production has never been on board. We know now that without a joint effort,
it's doomed to fail."
Two personnel moves set the tone for what was to come.
Pistelli, the engineering and maintenance manager (and a 30-year employee) at
the plant, was groomed in July of that year for the new post of corporate
reliability excellence manager by chief operating officer and executive vice
president Wayne R. Hale. Pistelli would be responsible for helping Ravenswood
and the other Century plants see the light about reliability improvement.
The plant then made a break with tradition by naming Carte as the facilitator
- the plant leader - of the new reliability initiative. Carte was a lifelong
production worker who most recently was a production general supervisor in the
pot room.
"That was a visible way to get out of the silo thinking," says Doeffinger.
Leadership stresses, however, that Carte was not chosen because of his
outside-of-maintenance background.
"The plant picked the right person for the job," says Pistelli. "The fact
that he's from production doesn't make it work. His desire to make it work
stands out."
Carte met some initial hesitance from the maintenance crew, but won favor
through open dialogue and by explaining that he had their backs as much as he
had those in production. Endorsement from the maintenance manager also paid
dividends.
"Jim told them, 'We have Scott running it. It's good to have someone from
production leading this. It's important to tie maintenance and production
together,'" says Carte.
Operators seem ready to tie the knot.
"By improving equipment uptime, we will have a less stressful environment. By
having the equipment running when we need it, it helps us do the job safely and
correct," says Greg Greathouse, a cell operator for the past six years in the
pot room.
Just as important to building the foundation has been the support and
involvement of corporate and plant management.
Hale has provided the vision, sponsorship, leadership, funding and stamp of
approval from on high. His mission has been to make common sense common
practice.
"While he believes in expansion and growth, he also believes in preserving
the assets that he has," says Pistelli. "Looking over the corporation, he
recognizes the need for reliability at each site to hold on to the assets that
you have and operate them to their full capability."
Chapman is funneling time and resources to the cause, and serving as the
executive sponsor of both the overall reliability initiative and its steering
committee.
Everyone has taken notice.
"Never before have we seen this type of support from up above," says Jeff
Carpenter, the maintenance/production supervisor in the rodding department.
"That is a very good sign."
Such breaks from the past have converted doubters and "flavor of the month"
naysayers and gotten plant workers focused on the task at hand.
"We, as the people on the floor, realize that we have to have this for the
survival of this plant and our jobs and for future employment," says operator
Wilson. "We realize that this is the best thing that we can do. This place is
important to the employees, the support jobs, the retail businesses in the area,
everyone."
Adds Carte, "We're not doing this for bragging rights or anything. It's to
give ourselves a future."
MILEPOSTS ON THE ROAD The plant is less
than a year into a reliability journey that could very well take five or more
years ... just to reach a "good" level. Best in class? That's way in the
distance. Even so, there have been a host of calendar entries that point to
progress. Mileposts on the road to reliability have included:
Reliability case study: Century Aluminum decided not to go solo on
this new quest. It hired Life Cycle Engineering as its consultant in October
2007. The first action was to send managers to an LCE "opportunity case
workshop" in Charleston, S.C. The class showed the comparative costs of a
reactive plant and a reliable plant. The Ravenswood team realized that going
proactive could bring tremendous returns.
Initial assessment: As a way to determine where the plant stood in
relation to established standards and practices of reliability excellence, LCE
performed a full site evaluation which spanned from November to late December
2007. The report gave Ravenswood an initial assessment score of .159 on a scale
of .000 to 1.000, placing it deep in the "reactive" category. The consultancy
defines categories as: reactive (.000 to .399), emerging (.400 to .549),
proactive (.550 to .749) and excellence (.750 to 1.000). This created a baseline
and a confirmation of need.
"Some managers viewed it as 'we're not that way at all,'" says Doeffinger.
"When I saw the scores, I said, 'That sounds about right to me.'"
Adds Carte, "You can debate the score, but the purpose was to see that you
are a totally reactive plant. It showed we have much work to do."
Master plan: In March, the consultancy finalized a personalized road
map to take the plant from Point A (reactive) to Point B (proactive). Action
items and long-term timelines were defined to address needs and close the gaps
identified in the assessment.
Steering committee: Chapman and Carte worked with LCE to create a
cross-functional steering committee in April 2008 to lead the new initiative;
provide support to focus groups; and align systems, structure and controls to
support reliability. The committee, consisting of five managers and two trades
workers, includes a purchasing manager, material handling manager, services
manager, technical manager, maintenance manager, cell operator and millwright.
Committee members and additional plant managers went through change management
training in April to prepare themselves and others for the journey.
Groups: Focus groups were created in May and June to oversee
reliability's influence on five key areas of opportunity. Each group contains
seven people (the vast majority of which are trades workers) whose job functions
are tied to a specific facet of reliability excellence. Groups include:
-
Work control - focus on specific aspects of maintenance work identification,
approval and execution
-
Operational improvement - focus on overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and
loss elimination
-
Planning and scheduling - focus on aspects of maintenance planning and
scheduling
-
Material management - focus on aspects of material management and procurement
-
Reliability engineering - focus on aspects of preventive and predictive
maintenance, and failure elimination
Communication: The pursuit of change has a tendency to breed rumors
and misinformation, especially in the early stages. Leaders got proactive to
ensure the correct message was provided to plant employees. In May, Carte
created brochures and posted signs that spelled out the purpose, goals and
deliverables of the initiative. (Text from the first sign is found in the
sidebar on Page 11.) He followed that up with a brochure in June that introduced
the groups and their members, quantified early progress, outlined current
activities and answered general questions on the minds of workers.
Current state: The focus groups led "brown paper" activities in June
and July that mapped out current processes and displayed areas of opportunity.
"The groups sit down and put the brown paper on the board," says Carte. "You
affix notes and mark it all up. You go over - from the perspective of a
maintenance supervisor, a production supervisor, operators, a scheduler/planner,
a maintenance technician - how you currently work. When you map it out, it's
like Spaghetti Junction in Atlanta - all of the highways cross each other. It
shows that you have a mess. Some people think they are doing it the right way,
but when you map it all out, you see the truth."
Focus groups began "white paper" activities - mapping out the desired future
state for processes - in August.
Pilot area: In June, the steering committee chose the rodding area to
be the test site for focused reliability enhancement projects.
"This area is critical," says department supervisor Carpenter. "This area can
never be shut down or it creates a major impact.
We have to provide anodes to the pot room and meet its quantity needs every
day. We have to stay here until the total is met."
Focus groups will spend six months to prescribe and enact measurable changes.
"The project is drawing light to this area," says Carpenter. "Hopefully, we
can create some lasting improvements."
HOPE FOR THE FUTURE Hope is a good word,
but it also reflects guarded optimism. The plant and its reliability initiative
are on the right path, but they are not out of the woods yet. Potential
roadblocks are on the horizon. These include:
Change: It is hard to change practices that have been in place for
decades. It's also a challenge to keep transformed areas (and workers in those
areas) from falling back to old, comfortable practices.
Fatigue: Reliability improvement is a long-term process. Century
believes it will take three to five years alone to get to a solid level of
reliability. It may take three to five additional years to achieve a measure of
excellence. Such a trek can tire people out.
"If we get halfway there in five years, there will be tremendous improvements
in this plant," says Doeffinger. "Along the way, though, we will be going
through the valley of despair. You have to retain your focus. You just have to
hang in there."
A tug on resources: Reliability improvement isn't the only game in
town. The plant is also performing a feasibility study to raise production by
increasing amperage, a huge undertaking.
"That could drain resources and turn people's attention," says Carte. "Plus,
there are other initiatives, there is always training ... something is always
coming up."
Bright spots, though, far surpass the gray.
The corporation is high on Ravenswood.
"The company and its leaders see a future for this place," says Carte. "They
see Ravenswood as a part of their future. The capacity increase is an example of
that. They want to do the right things while the aluminum market is good to make
us viable for a long-term future. They are backing us and giving us the support
to put us on the road to reliability excellence."
The near future for Ravenswood includes an increased use of predictive
maintenance technologies.
"We want to bring on oil analysis, vibration analysis, thermography," says
maintenance engineer Ed Austin, a 21-year plant vet. "That's part of the master
plan."
And, it includes increased staffing.
"Our next stage of commitment is to add planners, schedulers and reliability
engineers to get the entire infrastructure around that system to support it,"
says Chapman.
That's welcome news to guys like Doeffinger. "We're talking about increasing
capacity and spending money," he says. "From a maintenance standpoint, this is
heaven."
A NOBLE CAUSE The past is the past, but
on the road to reliability, it's OK to take a glance in the rear-view mirror.
"We really love this plant," says Pistelli. "Scott's dad worked here. My dad
worked here. This is what gave us our livelihood when we were kids, and it does
to this day. That is what is kind of making this a noble cause. It's about more
than just the job."
If you don't know where you've been, you don't know where you are going.
Century Aluminum's plant in West Virginia is going ... in the right direction.