January 15, 2007

Focus on O&M (January 2007)

PLANT MANAGEMENT

Time management

Power plant managers and supervisors spend many hours tracking and managing overtime. That's important, because uncontrolled overtime expenses can quickly consume an O&M budget. But it's equally important to track and manage idle time.

Overtime—the consequence of underestimating a plant's workload—has a relatively low ratio of cost (even at time-and-a-half or double-time pay) to productivity. By contrast, because no work is done during idle time, its cost-to-productivity ratio is infinity (the denominator is zero). From this perspective, idle time—which results from overestimating the work load—is the far more important metric. Many utilities and gencos proudly report that their workers put in less than 1% overtime. But few talk about their workers' idle time, which could constitute as much as 50% of the workday or workweek.

To trim idle time, managers have to do a better job of estimating their plant's true workload and ensuring that the staffing level matches it. When the managers of one utility (who wish to remain anonymous) recognized their idle-time problem, they sat down with plant operations supervisors and together came up with two conceptual solutions, called "regionalization" and "home alone."

Regionalization. Regionalization seeks to take advantage of a utility's multiple sites by sharing employees who are geographically proximate—even if they work at different plants. In the utility's new model, plants that are less than 20 miles apart can pool personnel to smooth out peaks and valleys in workload.

Naturally, the ideal radius depends on individual company needs. A southeastern utility, for example, has created what it calls a "virtual five-unit site" by bringing under one organization all the operations of five plants owned by its corporate parent. Although the five plants are much farther than 20 miles apart, employees routinely leave their normal duties for temporary assignments at sister stations. In this model, each plant assumes responsibility for specific collateral duties—such as radiation protection training—for all five plants.

Representatives of the utility report the program has produced numerous benefits, including reduced rivalry between plants, improved career growth opportunities for employees, and lower O&M expenses. They add that one company employee working at multiple sites can replace two contract employees, on the strength of his or her greater sense of ownership and knowledge of corporate processes.

Home alone. Home alone is the utility's term for operating a plant without onsite supervision during periods of low workload. An example would be maintaining a cycling plant that has been shut down for the weekend. Traditional utility practice, most consultants agree, often leaves a plant oversupervised. That's neither good for the O&M budget nor the professional growth of hourly workers.
 

Reap the rewards

Implementing the regionalization and home-alone strategies enabled the utility to reduce its operations supervisory staff by nearly 50%, largely by offering voluntary early retirement packages. Having addressed supervisory-level staffing, the utility now is beginning to work on hourly level staffing.
 

More scheduling solutions

Management consultants working in the power industry over the past few years have identified several other scheduling problems common to utilities that can be solved with a little creativity:

• Staffing cycling plants as if they were running baseload. Units that cycle require more sophisticated scheduling, just as manufacturing plants run specific schedules for specific product lines.
• Managing predictable but seasonally variable workloads. Unfortunately, many utilities' shift schedules do not reflect this variability. An appropriate schedule for a utility might require operators to work 56 hours per week without overtime during the peak season; workers would then be compensated for this imposition with 10 weeks of vacation in the off-peak season. Such schedules are routine in manufacturing industries and, if structured correctly, can even meet labor law and union requirements.
• Casting in stone the schedules for maintenance workers: Monday-to-Friday, eight-hour day shifts. But most maintenance, particularly for cycling plants, occurs at night and on weekends. Accordingly, it makes more sense to deploy the majority of maintenance personnel when the plant is shut down and have only small maintenance crews assigned to day shifts.

—POWER editors