Home / Featured, Maintenance Excellence / TPM without supervisors (it is possible!)

TPM without supervisors (it is possible!)

This is my third posting on maintenance supervisors (all supervisors). I started with a dilemma created by the redesign of a plant maintenance supervisors’ work. A reduction in the administrative activities should have been replaced with what I thought of as floor or face time. My second posting revealed a best practice at a pharmaceutical plant, where face time was specific and personal to each craftsperson, without focusing on the work order being performed.

This posting is from a visit some six years ago to the state-of-the-art Tampa Electric integrated coal gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) Polk Power Plant, which had a net generation of 260 megawatts, enough electricity to serve 75,000 homes.

It was an executive meeting of the Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals and included presentations about this unique plant and its workforce. It was a green plant in more than one way: The technology was designed with “green” in mind and it was a new plant (green) with all of the potential opportunities that go with that. What resulted was a world-class example of Total Productive Maintenance.

The opportunity with the most risk was the marriage of maintenance and operations. This was to be a very intense front-end work load with major operating cost impacts. Ergo, 55 crafts persons comprising five 11-person supervisor-less teams on rotating shifts, with the rotated out team devoted to planning and project type work.

What was unique was that all were experienced craftsmen in performing the required maintenance activities as well as performing plant operations. There were two managers: a plant manager and a maintenance manager. And, every three weeks, coincident with shift rotation, they traded places.

During the process of planning for the plant and its operation, management decided to do away with supervisors, planners, maintenance engineers and schedulers. Could not the maintenance/operators perform these activities? Well, yes, if it was laid out and appropriate training was provided to all concerned. It was decided that all of the functions of a world-class operation would be present and active, however resident within each team.

There were approximately 20 people interviewed for each position. Most unsuccessful applicants were uncertain about self-directed teams. After the first employees were selected, they and following hires would make up the interviewing teams. The position requirements included:

• The employee was a journeyman in a technical craft,
• Willingness to work in a team-empowered environment,
• To be cross trained to be multiskilled,
• Be trained on and support world-class maintenance principles,
• Be trained and willing to operate the plant equipment,
• And, be willing to do whatever the shift requires in concert with the other 10 team members.

Work order planning and within-shift scheduling would come from within the team.

Training coincided with the plant construction, taking advantage of the contractors and equipment vendors, participating in installations and simultaneously developing preventive, predictive and corrective maintenance procedures as training on plant and equipment operation.

Extensive training also covered the soft skills required for self-managed work teams and working in this open environment.

All administrative, planning and estimating, preventive and overhaul, operating, performance evaluation, stockroom, and maintenance engineering procedures were developed by the team members with guidance from the two managers, the plant technical staff and company employees from other plants. The “55″ owned the operation of this generating facility.

A CMMS system was specified by the teams, and world-class estimating, planning and scheduling was loaded into the system. PM tasks were assigned to the four shifts, and the rotating teams did not change this basic schedule unless it was agreed across teams. Each team developed expertise within itself for estimating and planning work orders and, most importantly, analysis of maintenance and operational performance.

Every three weeks, a member from each team would be chosen within the team as a shift representative through whom the other shifts communicated and the managers would convey pertinent information. After a year, the two managers thought that maybe the representatives should be paid extra for this three-week term. To a man, the 55 decided that management should take that additional money and divide it up to increase the hourly rate for all. “This is a team effort.”

Over the two years the plant had been in operation, team members all attended additional outside training, some began college programs, and all participated in continuous evaluations of all PM and PdM activities, and continued to practice continuous improvement.

If a Polk Plant employee reads this, could you please contact me and update the program so I may provide more information about this world-class application of TPM? The www.tampaelectric.com Web site provided information on additional plant expansions, and it would interest readers to know how the TPM from six years ago has weathered the changes.

Furthermore, if you have an interesting story to tell related to your plant’s implementation of TPM principles, post it to the blog site and e-mail me at RMGallaher@att.net.

Related posts:

1. Is your plant organization ship shape? Probably not. You are in the engine room of the USS Lincoln....
2. Skimping on the training puts your CMMS project at risk Training for users of a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS)...
3. Why does your plant run better when you’re not there? Isn't it strange that most plants, all over the world,...

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment and subscribing to the email alerts or RSS feed.

Filed Under: Featured, Maintenance Excellence    |  Tags: maintenance, maintenance management, TPM, training

Comments