Reliable Manufacturing Helps Chevron Take Pride in its Asset Management

Chevron’s Pembroke refinery has a reputation as being one of the best for reliability performance and recognising the impact a major failure would have on production, it engaged Reliable Manufacturing to help establish a sustainable reliability programme.

An Operations Excellence Master Class facilitated by Reliable Manufacturing helped identify a number of key areas where improvement could be made, and inspired the refinery’s senior management team to intensify its focus on defect elimination. Led by Project Manager, Richard Allen, the company established ‘project PRIDE’; Pembroke Refinery Implementing Defect Elimination.

The project is part of a strategic initiative to raise the importance of operational discipline and to ensure operations and maintenance staff complete ‘every task the right way, every time’, thus improving reliability, efficiency and safety at the refinery.  Richard Allen says the impact has been remarkable.

“The work ethic and communication between teams has been first class and we’ve made some significant improvements already,” he says.  “We believe we’ve now got the best lube oil management system within Chevron and are probably starting to hit world class standards.  We’ve reduced lube oil usage, and the meantime between failures of seals and bearings has improved significantly, which means we’re getting greatly improved equipment efficiency too.”

The Operations Excellence Master Class focuses in particular on the way processes and equipment are designed, operated and maintained.  “The Master Class has really encouraged ownership of the plant amongst the workforce and helped establish the importance of care and restoration of their machinery,” says Reliable Manufacturing’s Managing Director, Andrew Fraser.

Chevron intends to put all 300-plus operations and maintenance staff at the refinery through the Master Class programme over the next 18 months, but Allen says that even amongst those that have not yet attended, there is evidence of behaviour change as a result of the PRIDE project.  “There’s definitely been a knock-on effect,” he says. “People see others taking greater care of equipment and calling in maintenance less often, so they start to do it too.  People are taking the initiative; going the extra mile. It’s transforming the culture of the workforce,” he concludes.

The next public Operations Excellence Master Class is scheduled for April 22nd in Runcorn.  For more details please see the website: www.reliable-manufacturing.com.