First Annual Culture Awards Winners

The Reliability of Everything Culture Improvement awards recognize outstanding organizations in three categories.

Culture is critical. A case could easily be made that it’s the most important aspect of any enterprise. Establish and ingrain a positive/collaborative culture and you will move quickly to top-quartile status and realize significant gains in efficiency, reliability, safety, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

It is with this in mind that Efficient Plant magazine and the Univ. of Tennessee Reliability and Maintainability Center, Knoxville, collaborated to create The Reliability of Everything Culture Improvement awards. This month we announce winners for Best Sustaining Culture, Best Culture Innovation, and Best Culture Start-Up.

We are also pleased to have Emerson, St. Louis (emerson.com), as a signature sponsor of the culture awards program. Emerson has a long history of supporting positive/collaborative corporate cultures and helping organizations move to top-quartile performance. We appreciate their support and the recognition it gives to this awards program.

In addition to the descriptions of the award-winning organizations that follow, the companies were recognized in an award ceremony at the 24th Annual Maintenance and Reliability Conference (MARCON), held March 9 to 12 in Knoxville. Award winners each made presentations at the conference.

In the coming months, feature articles about each of the award winners will be published, providing much more information about these winning organizations.

Best Sustaining Culture
Saudi Aramco, Yanbu NGL Fractionation Plant, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The Saudi Aramco Yanbu NGL Fractionation plant, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is recognized as the Best Sustaining Culture for an ongoing program that has delivered improvements in more than 12 KPIs.

The Maintenance Division at the Yanbu NGL Fractionation Plant (YNGLFP) established an initiative titled Maintenance Excellence Management (MEM). This in-house program was aimed at enhancing reliability culture and to monitor/improve performance. It resulted in improvements in more than 12 key performance indicators. YNGLFP has already been recognized by winning the Saudi Aramco 2018 President’s Maintenance Award for the most improved organization.

The MEM team front row: H. Musilhy, M. Felemban, Y. Harbi, I. Raddai, M. Zahrani, M. Utiabi, H. Baswaid, M. Juhani, F. Tasaji, F. Ghamdi, G. Sobhi. Back row: H. Kohdiri, A. AbuAlkhair, J. Zaharani, S. Junaideb, B. Sugair, M. Maghrabi, A. Zahid, A. Fakhri, H. Felemban, A. Ansari.

Moreover, Yanbu NGL Fractionation Plant has been awarded the golden category of 2018 King Abdulaziz Quality Award for the section of Large Production Companies. Recently, YNGLF also won the golden level S. Aramco Operational Excellence Award for 2019.

Best Culture Start-Up
Roche Diabetes Care Inc., Indianapolis

The Best Culture Start-Up award recognizes the Reliability Strategy Team at Roche Diabetes Care Inc., Indianapolis. The team has taken a series of quick wins and converted them into a program that is rapidly improving plant-wide reliability.

Like most change efforts, one first needs the insight, understanding, and desire to change. Roche started with criticality assessments that turned into Pareto charts highlighting strategic and tactical opportunities. That turned into immediate action on “low hanging fruit” actions such as predictive-maintenance optimization and specific equipment improvements.

The award-winning Reliability Strategy Team at Roche Diabetes Care Inc., Indianapolis, consists of Todd Sullivan, Kris Berry, Joe Adam, Mark Ashton, Jeff Corey, and James Daniels (l-r).

This effort also clarified where a predictive or proactive approach would be most beneficial. This justified purchase of ultrasound equipment and enhancement of their infrared-thermography tools. These quick wins provided incentive to establish a Reliability Strategy Team to set and monitor KPIs (establish annual goals and objectives). Their current focus areas are improving planning and scheduling activities, enhancing training on precision maintenance techniques, and improving MRO storeroom practices and root-cause analysis techniques.

Best Culture Innovation
Inland Empire Utilities Agency, Chino, CA

The YTT (Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow) meetings have created a collaborative work environment at Inland Empire Utilities. In the meetings, Operations and Maintenance personnel come together to discuss the work that took place yesterday, the work that is taking place today, and the work that will take place tomorrow. This meeting has created a safe space for accountability, sharing of knowledge, team-member active participation, and action-log item tracking.

Inland Empire Utilities Agency award-winning team members are Carl Kreimeyer, Robert Delgado, Scott Lening, Jon Florio, Francis Concemino, Jamie Melton, Michael Dia, Scott Oakden, and Manuel Moreno (l-r).

Additionally, this meeting provides transparency in resource planning and scheduling, and generates a forecast of future work that may require a shutdown plan, safety LOTO, and confined-space entry. Through active engagement in this meeting, the Operations and Maintenance team is able to realize higher throughput from available resources. EP