Change agent
Alliant Energy serves about a million electric customers in a territory that covers the very southern portion of Minnesota, much of Iowa, and portions of Wisconsin. The company has 860 employees in the Generation Group working at 14 baseload plants; two new baseload plants are moving through the permitting process.
Significant management changes occurred in the Generation Group about 10 years ago when Tim Bennington, VP generation, began the slow process of redirecting the organization from a utility-centric to a business-centric one in which modern business practices were made a requirement rather than a goal. Bennington named this program Generation Excellence.
Not all of the “old school” plant managers were able to make the transition. In fact, all of the plant managers were eventually replaced with a new cadre of highly motivated, plant-savvy folks with good business acumen and excellent leadership skills. Many in the current corps of plant managers were recruited from outside the Alliant Energy organization from a diverse group of industries, typically manufacturing. After all, a power plant is really a complex manufacturing facility for electricity, and the required management skill sets for the two industries are similar. Today, over 80% of salaried personnel in the Generation Group have a college degree; 100% is the long-term goal.
Change doesn’t happen unless employees clearly understand why the new direction is necessary and what’s in it for them. The Generation Excellence program is distinguished by its focus on industry-leading performance and an empowered workforce. Bennington summarizes Generation Excellence as a constant commitment to daily operational excellence as characterized by six specific ingredients.
Employee safety. Zero accidents is the goal of every power plant, and Alliant Energy is no different. But what Alliant does differently is specifically track and document safety inspections and suggestions, and record near-misses so those events can be included in future safety lessons along with lessons learned from recordables and lost-time accidents. Housekeeping and safety audits have become part of the plant culture rather than optional.
Fiscal and operational excellence. According to Bennington, “fiscal execution is a key requirement for professional success.” That means a plant manager at Alliant must have the skills of both an engineer and a financier. Yes, generation results such as heat rate, forced outage rates, and plant availability remain extremely important to Alliant, as they have been for all plants since Edison commissioned the first U.S. central power plant in 1882. But O&M and capital budget management is now equally important to achieving plant generation goals. A good plant manager must also adopt best practices identified by industry benchmarking and use quality tools such as Six Sigma and lean management practices. The new generation of plant manager must be multidisciplined rather than purely a technical expert.
“We know from benchmarking that our generating stations are top performers when it comes to managing costs and operating reliably,” said Ken Wilmot, regional director-generation. “Operating efficiently by controlling costs on behalf of our customers is central to our core values. Our employees continually look for ways to manage costs while maintaining our high reliability and safety standards.”
Environmental stewardship. Any significant environmental mistake today will reverberate all the way to the board room and can attract considerable scrutiny from regulators and the press, whether or not a violation was intentional. Generation Excellence implemented a system of environmental peer reviews and audits to ensure regulatory compliance and anticipate potential problems. A proactive approach to environmental issues was also introduced that includes the beneficial use of ash to minimize landfill usage and use of advanced NOx reduction technologies such as SmartBurn (www.smartburn.com).
Performance goals tied to stakeholder value. Individual plant operation goals are now directly linked with monitored operational and commercial availability, O&M costs, the efficiency of capital investments, Six Sigma savings, any environmental violations, and the severity and rate of safety violations.
Improved asset performance monitoring. A plant manager can’t manage what he can’t monitor. Accurate and timely data is a key feature of an organization striving to operate using lean management principles. Significant investment has been made to improve standard work practices by using Maximo at all of Alliant Energy’s plants for managing preventive and predictive maintenance programs and hours tracking, and by using EtaPRO and Thermal Engineering software tools for thermal performance monitoring. Alliant’s generating fleet is also migrating to Maximo 6.2, the new browser-based upgrade that will link the maintenance management system more closely to the company’s enterprise resource management system.
Workforce planning and engagement. Alliant Energy, like so many other companies in this industry, is addressing the effects of an aging workforce on plant operations with a series of recruiting and retention programs. The brunt of the impact on Alliant began last year and is expected to extend through 2011, when the largest projected turnover in the company’s history will occur. Alliant has the typical recruitment processes in place for technical staff and skilled craft labor but has also focused on hiring skilled management staff from outside the utility industry—an unusual approach in what is typically thought of as a very insular industry. The plant staff is also more engaged with daily and weekly planning meetings, during which improvements in operating processes are explored and best practices are shared among plants.
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