(106a) Best Practices Driving Excellence in Plant Performance

Chemical and Process Plants are becoming increasingly more complex as smart equipment is becoming the new industry norm. Operators, Mechanics and Technical Personnel are constantly inundated with overwhelming streams of data. The growth of plant data has to some extent desensitized our staff to the intended warning flags through this data overload, unfortunately allowing critical information to pass through the system unnoticed. So, despite the sophistication of equipment and monitoring systems, plant failures are still too commonplace. As such, site performance continues to fall short of expectations as evidenced by unacceptable unplanned plant downtime, loss of containment related incidents, operator work-arounds due to equipment unavailability, and high loss profit opportunities. As expected, a retrospective analysis often in the form of event investigations most often reveal that existing plant data and “weak signals” were evident well in advance of the impending failures. Typically, readily available information and precursor events were either not detected, ignored or acted upon. Operating and technical personnel were unable to clearly identify, prioritize, communicate, and mitigate the growing plant risk to prevent the undesired “loss of control” and asset damage.

HOPE Consulting personnel with our broad experience from military, national research labs, commercial nuclear power generation, oil & gas, and mining industries has developed and implemented cross-industry best practices to address these performance shortfalls. The goal of our practices is to support uninterrupted runs between turnarounds, and greatly reduce the likelihood of significant equipment and human failures. These methods assist the operating staff to sort through the live plant data and plant physical anomalies to clearly identify, prioritize and mitigate impending equipment/plant failures. In addition, our process allows your organization to calculate the return on investments (ROI) resulting from our proven methods.

Through the integration of critical plant data, the operating teams can review & analyze performance, identify health threats & adverse trends, prioritize them appropriately and implement timely corrective actions. Team members are trained and become proficient in recognizing these “weak signals” and acting upon them before the equipment conditions become self-revealing e.g. equipment failure (enhancing equipment reliability). Personnel are trained in concept of “building the capacity to fail safe” increasing the likelihood that small failures do not cascade into major losses or incidents. Additionally operations, engineering, and maintenance personnel are mentored in the performance of Asset Integrity Inspections, a lost art as staff become increasingly dependent on process data and plant automation while becoming more disconnected from their plant equipment they maintain and operate.

Through this proven process, work teams have demonstrated their ability to proactively identify degrading conditions and underlying causes and enhanced prevention, rather than reacting to plant events. Additionally, business areas can now more effectively manage the supporting reliability programs and reduce the total number of exceptions and deviations which have contributed to unreliability in the past. Finally, systems and management processes are put in place to facilitate the necessary reinforcement, accountability, and process sustainability.