Improved Culture Cuts Downtime

Dow’s Deer Park, TX,
operations employ nearly 700 people within eight production areas that run as separate ‘plants within a plant.’ Specialty chemicals manufactured here go into a wide range of consumer products, including paints, detergents, floor-care solutions, adhesives and sealants, coatings, plastics, personal-care items, and water-purification chemicals.

By Shadrach A. Stephens, The Dow Chemical Co.

Infusing cultural improvements into reliability strategies helped Dow’s Deer Park, TX, operations realize an 85% improvement in unplanned instrument-related downtime.

As management philosopher Peter Drucker once described it, “Company culture is like country culture: Never try to change it. Instead, work with what you have.” That’s what we’ve done at Dow Deer Park.

Instead of an emphasis on making changes with respect to our site’s instrument-reliability program, we focus on delivering improvements. In turn, the results of our team effort have led to an 85% reduction in instrument-related unplanned downtime. What we’ve learned along the way could help others on their own reliability journeys.

Empowering our reliability team to meet expectations was the start of our journey toward a goal of zero instrument-related unplanned downtime. From 2008 to 2011, we averaged 50 unplanned events annually. As a result of our program, the team concluded 2014 with just eight unplanned events. Through the first quarter of 2015, we only had one.

The following examples reflect several of our specific improvements over the past four years:

• Among the many instrumented technologies in a plant, control valves are the most likely to suffer wear and cycle damage. In the past, Deer Park had been dealing with an annual average of 17 unplanned downtime events associated with these issues. To reduce these problems, we developed a three-pronged approach:
  • prioritize our most critical valves
  • adhere to sound spare-parts-management practices
  • implement effective overhaul and condition-based maintenance strategies, including the use of HART-based technology to monitor valve conditions and identify problems before they could result in downtime.

As a result, unplanned downtime events plummeted from an average of 17/year to just two. Our team’s achievement—a remarkable reduction in unplanned downtime over a three-year period that, combined with several other improvement initiatives, yielded substantial financial savings, including millions of dollars in EBIT (earnings before interest and tax)—led to Dow Deer Park’s selection as the 2013 HART Plant of the Year by the HART Communication Foundation, Austin, TX (see sidebar below).

• Working with Deer Park’s process-automation team, the instrument-reliability team implemented two software packages to track real-time instrument and control-valve performance: one we developed through our data historian and the other purchased from an OEM.
  These tools now communicate equipment deficiencies to the site’s subject-matter experts and indicate when failures occur or are about to occur. Over time, this proactive approach has helped our operations avoid many unplanned events, as well as the significant production losses they could have caused.
• Our top-opportunity list included two technologies that suffered repeat failures, leading to considerable production losses over a multi-year period: D/P-level transmitters with liquid-filled impulse lines would fail due to heat tracing, tubing leaks, and loss of fill. Firebox temperature sensors in thermal oxidizers would fail due to thermocouple burnout and element damage.

The instrument-reliability team’s solution was to identify new technologies that could replace the existing installations and leverage them across all applicable production units at Deer Park. This type of front-end-loading process, developed with the facility’s capital-project team, helped expedite improvements. As a result, mean time between failure (MTBF) rates in the referenced production units improved, and no unplanned events have occurred since the installation of the new technologies.

Dow Chemical acquired Rohm and Haas in 2009. The Rohm and Haas Co. had been operating in Deer Park, TX, since 1947. Today, Dow’s expansive Deer Park operation manufactures a variety of specialty chemicals in eight production areas spread across 900 acres along the busy Houston Ship Channel.

The customer’s voice

It’s been said before: Reliability is a team sport that requires support from multi-disciplined professionals who are focused on short- and long-term improvements. Understanding the challenges of the customer is a key component in defining tailored solutions. The reliability team’s success is determined by meeting the needs of our customers from the operations side of the organization.

To facilitate listening, instrument-reliability engineers conducted a series of brainstorming sessions with facility leadership and instrument technical-service representatives. The team used the Kaizen approach to manage discussions and engage maintenance staff.

This dialogue not only inspired the instrument-reliability team to create new strategies, it also generated confidence in the group among facility leaders because they were consulted from the outset. This level of leadership acceptance gave our team the flexibility it needed to create custom solutions and later request additional resources, i.e., human and equipment capital.

Buy-in was established at the leadership level and improvement opportunities were discussed from both sides of the table as a result of understanding the needs of the customer. These sessions led to the team’s comprehensive reliability strategy, which was translated from the need of short-term and long-term solutions.

Short-term projects typically looked at reactive and proactive activities that addressed day-to-day challenges. This also provided opportunities to investigate and collect data on long-term improvements. Strategies for these projects included:

• Unplanned-event investigations—conduct informal and formal instrument root-cause investigations.
• Real-time equipment monitoring—use diagnostics for live status updates on critical instruments and control valves.
• Instrument assessments—complete visual inspections of all existing installations.
• Accounting, compliance, and custody transfer—perform preventive/predictive maintenance (P/PM) on critical instruments.

Long-term projects addressed more challenging opportunities using reliability strategies. This also involved shifts in thinking toward a reliability-centered culture and the front-end loading of instrument-engineering projects. Strategies for these projects included:

• Equipment-maintenance strategies—identify critical equipment, spare parts inventory, and P/PM.
• Top 10 list—address repeat offenders, bad actors, and high-priority failures.
• Technology upgrades—establish synergies with design engineering for high-priority instrument projects.
• Facility-condition assessment—look ahead to future instrument projects and situations where those can improve production.

Supported by a strong, innovative reliability culture, the successful Instrument Reliability Program at Dow’s Deer Park operations in Texas has led to an 85% reduction in unplanned instrument-related downtime in the past few years.

Generate innovation

Sustained by the execution process, the innovation engine is a basic element in delivering a strategy. One striking aspect of maintenance and reliability is the many innovations that are available to help improve equipment performance. Facilities, however, still struggle to realize the benefits of these technologies. The crux of this challenge seems to be more aligned with cultural behaviors than the lack of technology.

Upon completion of our customer sessions, the next step included developing internal processes and assigning responsibility to individuals who would maintain them. The instrument-reliability engineers gathered information on the “who, what, when, where, and how” for each of these services. This information came from small pilot studies performed in our production units.

Research findings were then used to create simple process maps that allowed our group to assign sequential steps aimed at accomplishing the set goals. This operating discipline was the foundation for automating how activities were to be executed.

Click to enlarge. Buy-in was established at the leadership level, and improvement opportunities were discussed from both sides of the table as a result of understanding the needs of the customer. The comprehensive reliability strategy was translated from the need for short-term and long-term solutions.

Sharpened focus

The “4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX)” proposed by McChesney, Covey, and Huling (Free Press, New York, 2012), highlights the two ingredients that leaders can use to deliver their goals: strategy and the execution. Most leaders struggle with the execution process. In fact, according to management-consultant Ram Charan (Charan Associates, Dallas), “70% of strategic failures are due to poor execution of leaders rather than a lack of smarts or vision.” Consequently, execution plans must focus on the most crucial aspects of accomplishing the team’s goals. Such plans should separate urgent activities from those of lesser priority.

When driving innovation among teams, sites must also be aware of a familiar trap that shifts leaders off target: the law of diminishing returns. There will always be more good ideas than you have the capacity to execute. For this reason, establishing goals centered on leading and lagging metrics is important for razor-sharp execution.

According to 4DX principles, goals should be structured according to, “From X to Y by When,” and should also align with the team’s scoreboard. The leading metrics are an actual measure of goals and the lagging metrics are predictive activities that the team can influence daily with a direct relationship to the corresponding leading metric.

Our instrument-reliability program used this sharpened approach to evaluate the status and success of the improvement strategy. Each service, created from the short- and long-term elements, contained a lagging measurement, and the team members performed weekly “cadence of accountability” review sessions to monitor the metric completion. Our razor-sharp focus allowed team members to make quick adjustments to the strategy as unplanned events occurred. It also accelerated activities wherein success was being realized.

The cadence and scoreboard elements also transformed goal perceptions into a competitive, winning culture that increased employee morale.

Team members have come to feel as though they are a part of something larger than themselves. Moreover, the weekly interactions with scoreboard updates help keep the robust momentum going. MT

Shadrach Stephens brings 11 years of engineering and management experience to his role as maintenance group leader, Instrument & Electrical Technical Services, for the Dow Chemical Co., Texas Operations, in Deer Park, TX. His current responsibilities include providing maintenance, reliability, and work-process leadership for a technically aligned team of subject-matter experts within the company. Stephens holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Southern Univ. and A&M College, Baton Rouge, LA, and is a certified Six Sigma and Lean/Kaizen practitioner. He can be reached at SAStephens@dow.com.

Members of the Dow Deer Park Instrument Reliability Team and Plant Leadership, with article author Shadrach A. Stephens (center, holding plaque), accept the 2013 Plant of the Year Award from the HART Foundation.

The HART Award: Recognizing Ingenuity

The HART Plant of the Year Award that Dow’s Deer Park operations received (for 2013) is presented annually by the HART Communication Foundation, Austin, TX, to recognize people, companies, and plant sites that use advanced HART capabilities in real-time applications to improve operations, reduce costs, and increase availability.

The HART Communications Foundation is an international, not-for-profit, membership organization supported by more than 300 companies worldwide. Founded in 1993, it is the technology owner, standards-setting body, and central authority on the HART Protocol and provides global support for application of the technology.

According to the HART Foundation, more than 40 million HART-enabled measurement-and-control field devices and systems are installed in facilities around the world.

Previous HART Plant of the Year Award recipients include Monsanto (USA); Shell (Canada); MOL (Hungary); Mitsubishi Chemical (Japan); PVSDA (Venezuela); Statoil (Norway); Sasol Solvents (South Africa); BP (USA);  Clariant (Germany); and Dupont (USA). To learn more about the award program, visit hartcomm.org.