February 15, 2007

Focus on O&M (February 2007)

PLANT MANAGEMENT

Revised operating procedures

Many plant managers pride themselves on how smoothly things are running when the station is up at full load and all conditions are at steady state. They beam at how the operators alertly man their stations, how the mechanics go about their lubrication tasks, and how even routine reports are efficiently administered.

However, the plant managers' joy is analogous to that of the motorcyclist who thinks he's a skilled rider because he looks good in his leathers as he's cruising down a straightaway. How skilled he really is will be determined by how he handles the unseen potholes, the sudden curves, and the out-of-control pickup truck careening his way.

Similarly, it's how the power plant crew handles transient and upset conditions that differentiates the well-run from the poorly run facility. A plant manager prepares the crew for unexpected events by developing and enforcing the use of operating procedures for all start-up, shutdown, and emergency situations. Developing the procedures is the easy part; getting people to use them day in and day out is much tougher (see box).

A classic illustration of the importance of sticking to operating procedures occurred not too long ago at a nuclear plant in the U.S. Northwest. A control room supervisor opened a bypass valve on the reactor-water cleanup system to help control reactor-vessel level. The supervisor knew that opening the valve violated the written procedure, but he also knew he could open it 4%, which would help control level, before the "open" indicator light came on. According to the NRC's investigating team, the supervisor cracked open the valve, keeping the indicator light off, and then said, "See, it's not open."

Such disregard for operating procedures often is caused either by the procedures themselves or the process by which they're developed. For example, many operators dislike using procedures written by outsiders. They will deliberately ignore instructions that insult their intelligence and will stubbornly refuse to follow procedures that they believe are inaccurate.

Who can blame the operators? Those slick, hard-bound manuals provided by vendors or contracted technical writers are usually full of errors, ambiguities, and omissions—not because the outsiders are stupid but because they compile the manuals in a vacuum. The writers are isolated in time and space from the one thing that matters most—your power plant. They have no personal relationship with the switches, valves, and shafts. But your operators and maintenance technicians do. They understand these components; they know where they are and how they function; and they care about them.

Recently, many utilities have "turned Japanese" about their operating procedures by allowing workers to fix them so they get the job done the right way—not the way some manager wants it done. One Pennsylvania-based utility formed a "maintenance council" of craft workers from two of its stations and engineers from its corporate headquarters to study its 2,600 written procedures. The council found that 1,200 of the procedures could be deleted as useless and that another 1,000 could be consolidated down to 460.

The council then established a four-way team to jointly work through the rewriting process:

• The sponsors were managers, responsible for making resources available.
• The authors were engineers, charged with reducing technical information to the minimum necessary, while still maintaining accuracy.
• The writers streamlined the wording by as much as 35%.
• The owners were craft workers, who ensured that the final product was workable and user-friendly.

When the council first met, the invited members were, understandably, highly skeptical that anything useful would come of the initiative. But once the process started rolling, participants began to see real progress being made, and they became believers. As a result of the program, operating procedure violations have been "almost wiped out," according to the utility, because the craft workers have pride of ownership. Because they wrote the procedures, they believe in following them. The utility is realizing impressive cost savings, too, thanks to the streamlined O&M processes.

—POWER editors