Sharing the load
Many plants report doing more multi-skill training of operators to qualify them to perform the more routine maintenance tasks that in the past would have been considered the purview of the maintenance department. The top reported goals of such training were to have operators “assist maintenance during outages” (26 respondents), “replace large motor air filters” (15), and “perform equipment oil changes” (14). The two tasks for which maintenance craft workers were surely grateful for operators’ help were “change light bulbs” (20) and “clean the plant” (18).
To cover the other end of the spectrum, the study also asked respondents whether they are increasingly asking maintenance workers to perform “crossover” tasks traditionally done by operators. The overwhelming response (93%) was “no,” although three plants did note that their boiler water monitoring is done by chemistry/environmental techs, and their daily chemistry by I&C techs. Clearly, the trend is to train operators to perform more maintenance-related tasks, rather than to train maintenance workers to handle more operations chores.
The survey responses were mixed on whether in-house and contracted craft workers were assigned jointly to maintenance tasks (comingling). Fifty-three percent of respondents said that is common practice, but only on a straight-time basis.
The detailed maintenance staffing survey has several layers of data that can be sliced and diced by study participants. Let’s begin exploring them by delving into the details of maintenance craft and full-time contractor head count by plant size. (Remember, only by participating in the study can you gain access to all the raw data you’ll need to benchmark yourself against your peers.)
Figure 1 illustrates the full-time craft maintenance head count at small plants (<499 MW) in the reporting sample, identified by company and contractor. To enable comparisons on an apples-to-apples basis, head counts include I&C and full-time contractors but exclude supervisors, planners/schedulers, regional maintenance workers, plant cleaners, occasional contractors, and non-craft maintenance personnel. Figure 2 shows the maintenance craft head counts at plants rated between 500 MW and 999 MW, Figure 3 shows the counts for plants between 1,000 MW and 1,999 MW, and Figure 4 reflects plants larger than 2,000 MW. The plant codes shown below the bars were assigned to respondents to ensure their anonymity.
Maintenance craft head count appears to be a function of the number of units in a plant, but only up to a point. For example, Figure 5 shows that head count varies widely, but—not unexpectedly—increases sharply when a plant has larger units. Higher head counts also seem to be the case for plants configured with FGD systems.
5. Full-time maintenance craft head count by number of units per plant. Source: EUCG
The study results also indicate that some plants cross-train their I&C technicians to make them combination I&C techs/electricians, or IC&Es. Figures 6 through 9 show the head counts for this craft category in the same four plant size categories as Figures 1 through 4 for full-time maintenance craft personnel. The next layer of survey detail, available only to survey participants, correlates I&C head count with the presence of a DCS and an FGD system. The IC&E staffing strategy was found to be more prevalent in smaller plants than in larger plants.
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