When it comes to measuring or benchmarking true craft productivity, industry leaders have a choice of approaches.
"There is the 'earn vs. burn,' which is 'How much work is getting done?' vs. 'How much am I paying for it?'" said Dolly Boden, global turnaround leader at Chevron. "And then there's the tool time piece, which asks, 'Do I have my estimate accurate?'"
Chevron employs a program from a tool time perspective that tracks "what is happening with this guy at this particular time," Boden said on a panel discussing craft productivity at the AFPM Reliability & Maintenance Conference and Exhibition held recently in Grapevine, Texas.
Regarding the "earn vs. burn" approach, Boden said most of Chevron's sites use a tracking system called ProTrack.
"They are looking at the schedule, how many hours are worked by a contractor for a particular turnaround," she said, adding that ProTrack also monitors the number of workers on a project, as well as "the time they're going through the gate."
Joining Boden on the panel, Robin Harris, global turnaournd estimating and cost control lead at Phillips 66, said her company looks at the schedule performance index, "meaning that we earn the hours on that day that we should have earned."
"And every day that we don't earn that hour, that's a slip," she added.
Harris said "managing the schedules" includes asking questions like, "Do we have the right people here, regardless of their performance at 40 or 80 percent productivity?" and "Are we getting the work done?"
Shoot for long-term consistency
Co-panelist Hardy Kemp, director of projects and turnarounds for Flint Hills Resources, said he agrees an indicator of operational productivity is "to look and see if you're getting what you're supposed to be getting schedule-wise."
Regarding "plan vs. actual productivity," Kemp said having "a fat estimate" makes it easier to show good productivity, but he would much rather "put a competitive estimate out there."
If that estimate indicates poor productivity, "I can dig in and I can see if it is truly poor productivity or if there's something I need to focus on to get my schedule back on track," Kemp said. "Do I have the right resources and the right priorities? Have I removed those roadblocks to make that job go as efficiently as possible?"
Kemp also emphasized the need for managers to consider consistently demonstrated productivity and progress "year after year and turnaround after turnaround."
This approach calls for a shift from a predictable outcome to a competitive outcome, Kemp said.
"That means you are sometimes going to overspend within a range of outcomes on schedule and cost, so set a target that is competitive vs. predictable," he continued. "Maybe you go a little bit longer and spend a little more, but that's still better than spending inside that predictable asset because you never know what you could have done. You never know where your next improvement lies."
Clayton Shoemaker, director of turnaround best practices at Valero Energy Corp., pointed out, "We really don't know what that true productivity is. We say it's plus or minus 10 or 20 percent, but how many of these are minus 20? Statistics say that some [project estimates] are going to under-run."
The reality is, Shoemaker said, that "we don't under-run these. You set the aggressive targets and go over. But you've got to have the management stomach for that."
The goal, Shoemaker concluded, is to "do better than your peers. That's what we're all trying to do. We're all trying to outwork each other -- do it quicker, do it faster -- so we can make more gasoline than our competitor."
