Not What but How That is Important!!!

It’s not about what products you produce; it’s about your assets and your employees.

While most organizations think that they are “unique” in some aspect of the way they make their products, the truth is that every organization’s performance level comes down to two things: assets and people.

Yes, technologies vary from company to company, and there certainly is some uniqueness to aspects of the way products get made at different companies, but at the end of the day, all things are manufactured by assets and the people responsible for the running and programming (and the ultimate output) of those assets.

Solomon’s International Study of Plant Reliability and Maintenance Effectiveness (RAM Study) has produced data proving that, across the refining and petrochemical industry, it matters more how a product is made than what is made. Within like chemistries and chemical families there is virtually no difference in the performance of the best performers.

Before sharing the RAM Study data I just mentioned, I would like to share a couple of personal perspectives—perspectives that might alter your point of view. If you think that what you do from a production standpoint is “unique”—and that participation in a benchmarking study like the RAM Study is unwarranted, because “well, they just don’t do it like we do, we are unique”—the following may help convince you otherwise.

Let me start with an asset technology point of view. The assets for all processes are engineered, designed, and configured to make the product that they are engineered, designed, and configured to make. Assets are purchased, configured, and installed, taking into consideration temperature, pressure, corrosivity, flammability, explosivity, and myriad other process conditions affecting their ability to effectively produce a specified product. Following from that premise, if the design, configuration, and operation of an asset are correct for the product, then, regardless of the chemistry and process family, an asset should last for the life of the equipment design, no matter how “unique” one particular technology may be.

If the design is correct, then it must be the variation in people and systems in place used to operate the asset that makes a difference. From personal experience, I think that is in fact true. Multiple times in my career, I have led the transformation of the operation and therefore the productivity and profitability of an organization from very poor performance to outstanding performance. In some cases the assets were thought to be impossible to run because of their “uniqueness.” In others the problem was confusion about what the primary strategy was for the operation. But in all cases the key was changing the how. In all cases exactly the same people, with exactly the same assets, did the work. Differences in focus and mindset caused one unique group of assets to move from a first-pass prime production rate of 78% to 92 consecutive days of 100% first-pass prime production, changing the financial picture of the facility from barely profitable to highly profitable in the process. In another case, a unique group of assets would historically go offline about 20 times a year. Later, with the same group of people running those assets, the assets ran continuously for two and a half years without ever going off line.

The bottom line is that it is not what you make but how you make it that makes the difference.

The data from the RAM Study says exactly the same thing. It is not what you make but how it is made that makes all the difference. If you examine a wide range of process families, while there is some variation from process family to process family, across the entire industry, at the interface of Q1 and Q2 performance—for that wide range of process families—the re-indexed RAM Efficiency Index (RAM EI), Mechanical Availability Index (MAI), and Maintenance Cost Index (MCI) are not tremendously different.   The data confirms in all three benchmarking categories if you are at the Q1/Q2 interface of performance in one process family that same performance in another process family is typically Q1 or possibly at the very high end of Q2 performance. 

Across the industry, no matter what you make, the important thing is how, and the RAM Study helps to define the how in granular fashion so that those participating can work toward improved performance.