Site: Beaumont, TX
Description of the Site: The Beaumont refinery is one of the top five in North America with Beaumont processing 400,000 bbls/day.
Nature of the Opportunity: Mobil leadership desired to identify the next step in their reliability efforts, specifically tying reliability to costs and benefits. They coined the term, "Business-Driven Reliability" to identify their objectives.
What We Did: Based on the Assessment, we proceeded with a design phase that combined our ideas regarding Asset Management, and Mobil's ideas on "Business-Driven Reliability". The design led to a number of core processes:
Creating new Asset Care tasks for production equipment
Identifying equipment condition and taking immediate action for degraded equipment
Developing a new planning process at the plant level, production unit level and for maintenance. This was a truly proactive approach, and created project targets for improvements in reliability and maintainability for the following year, based on the specific performance required to meet the business plan for the refinery
Providing improved measurement and documentation of change and reliability practices and structure
Coordinating all communications within the production organization, moving them to a future orientation, rather than just the immediate problem
Coordinated the initial use of The Manufacturing Game ® www.manufacturinggame.com to better engage personnel at all levels of the organization, that was strongly supported by union leadership
Results: More than $20 million of production improvements were implemented early in this process. Defining and implementing improvements became a part of the local culture. In fact we received excellent support by the unions involved, because it added to the value that each hourly worker added to the company.