Your Outages iPod
“I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.”
Steve Jobs
A pretty good quote from …..well lets agree, a very creditable source. How does all this equate to Zone Outage Control, iPod’s and your next outage, well I’m glad you asked…
The Point:
The simpler a task is, the easier it is to complete. The simpler something is to use, the more it gets used. Every minute during an outage counts, and from a dollar and cents perspective, counts big.
Having all the information at your fingertips, like having all of your albums on your iPod, in the palm of your hand, makes things much easier.
Each outage has at least a thousand questions. These can range from “what is the height of the wear rail in regards to the centerline of the drive shaft” to “what’s the metallurgy of the main steam stop seal ring? ” These questions often make more than a few people scratch their heads. And while you can rummage through whatever prints the facility has, there is always a nagging concern in the back of your head, asking the question, “is this the right print?”
Imagine if you had one book that was structured like an iPod. Every print that is cataloged and organized, as if it was a song to its author.
Each outage has a Gantt chart that contains hundreds of tasks, most of which cannot be understood, and are mostly inaccurate.
Imagine if each crew got a list of tasks that needed to be completed each shift in order to stay on or beat schedule. Imagine if all that information was in the same book, our iPod, wouldn’t that be simpler?
Each outage has the ultimate bottom line question that everyone wants to know. “What’s it all going to cost?” or “are we under budget?” Tracking costs during an outage generally takes a great deal of effort and can often yield the same results that you would get from a 100 monkeys with typewriters.
Imagine if you could tell, within 5%, of what you had spent to date, and what it was going to cost to finish, just 4 hours after the end of the shift with just a clerk working on it for a couple of hours. That’s much easier don’t you think?
At the end of the day, a simple easy to understand outage is easier to execute and that translates to better quality, less money and less time.
Zone Outage Control will reduce cost and schedule at your plant by 10% a year for at least three years. How much is that worth to you?
The Story:
One of my job titles was “engineer” and although I have a degree, and that degree says engineering on it, I don’t really think of myself as one. I can fix anything (though I may break it worse in the first or second attempt.) In regards to outage reports I tended to be …..”hmmmmm what’s the word I’m looking for” “Lazy”….No that’s too strong, “lackadaisical” ….maybe. Basically I was generally confused about the amount of effort we put into outage reports juxtaposed by the usefulness of them.
I never saw us using these tomes of information, and besides everything was words without pictures, and we would always get the tube numbering wrong or something similar. (One outage I was following the written report. We needed to cut out a tube that was severely corroded. I went up with the mechanic and we cut out the tube on the sheet. When we go it out it looked completely fine……I looked at the boiler for a few minute and we went to the mirror image of where the tube was, and sure enough we found the bad tube.) So the books never got used, even though there was a lot of effort into writing them.
I had a boss at this time; let’s call him “Mr. Red Pencil or MRP for short”. Good guy but he had a passion for writing and correctness. I am, however, severely dyslexic and not quite a linear thinker. One of MRP’s jobs was to receive from me long lengthy written reports. This was an exercise, on my behalf, to find unique ways of spelling particular words, and rambling dissertations of what actually happened during the outage. I felt sorry for him so I went out and bought him a bunch of red pencils because he was going to need them. Eventually he left the department. I’m sure it had nothing to do with me, but as I write this and remember our many rewrites of outage reports, I’m less sure.
When “Mr. Red Pencil” left the department, I got a promotion and one of the first things I did was stop writing outage reports. Instead, I collected all the scraps of paper that got scribbled on during the outage. Coffee stains, dirt, grease were all tell tale signs that this paper has seen some action somewhere. I gathered all of these notes, drawings, sketches that were written up. I put a binder clip on everything from pieces of wood to tabs of cardboard boxes. TA-DA!!!! The outage report was done. When someone would ask me a question about where was that leak or which sootblower needed to be index’d, I would thumb through my collection of the true, and invariably I would find it.
As the year went by I made up drawings and inspection documents that could be copied, colored and scribbled on. As each inspection sheet gets filled out that became my ‘as found condition’ and then I would take the same blank and draw the scope that I wanted to execute and that became my ‘scope documents.’ Lastly the scope documents would be signed by ops, maintenance and engineering and that would then become my close out documents.
All of these documents go into a three ring binder and that would become our outage report. The book I have just described is one of three tools of Zone Outage Control called the Boiler Book. The Boiler Book is your outages iPod. It has everything you need to plan, manage, and execute an outage.
