Reliability issues that occur in plants are often human-driven, according to David Reed, director of plant services division with Eastman Chemical.
"We try to learn from those and have systems in place [to learn from them], and then reteach, retrain and try to drive out what's causing these human reliability problems."
Fortunately, advances in new technology are supplying the workforce with new tools to help promote reliability, Reed said. It's something that's ever-evolving, and something that impacts the workforce every day.
Reed acknowledged that today's workforce is younger and "much more plugged-in from an IT standpoint," and his site is working to maximize that advantage.
"We're starting to look more at using hand-held devices in the field," he said. "Are we going to put job plans on an iPad and those kinds of things that can be right there at your fingertips? They can have all the job and safety information. These are places we want to go, but we're not quite there yet."
Reed said he believes this technology will "help us with our productivity and, frankly, quality of workmanship when that information is available. We have an expectation that can drive the behaviors around it being utilized."
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Jimmy Jernigan, assistant director of global maintenance and reliability with LyondellBasell and David Reed, director of plant services division with Eastman Chemical.
Workers may already carry that information with them on paper, Reed said, "in their back pocket, but they never pull it out. So we've still got to drive the behavior side of it, even if we have these tools available. Tools can enable a lot of things, but we're seeing gaps in our performance."
Jimmy Jernigan, assistant director of global maintenance and reliability with LyondellBasell, shared that his company's plants actively started driving "a good reliability culture" approximately two years ago.
He agreed with Reed about human performance obstacles.
"If I look at what is the next big step we can make, human performance is an area where we can make improvements. We're seeing more and more that those human elements are driving failures in our plant, both from across a process safety standpoint and reliability," Jernigan said during Downstream USA 2022, held recently in Houston. "We're putting up a program across all the different disciplines like process safety and reliability. Our hope is that it can help us, whether it's with craftsmanship, engineers or inspectors."
Jernigan hopes the program helps people become more aware of when they're prone to making mistakes, as well as having the tools to guide them toward thinking differently.
"Maybe you don't need to have a procedure for every single thing that you do," he continued, "but maybe there are ones that you really want to make them aware that they need, and the error rate would be much, much higher if they didn't use that."
Jernigan speculated that there may be a stigma among workers against using policy and procedure, "Maybe people think you don't know what you're doing if you use them."
"A big education needs to occur and that's what we're going to work on through the end of the year. Then we're going to work on trying to integrate [that information]," Jernigan said.
Reed concluded that prioritization is critical to a balanced reliability program.
"When you think about your asset management strategies, do you have your assets settled to criticality? That's going to drive some of your decision-making," he said. "Try to stay out of the reactive mode. We have to do these things not only to keep our assets running, but also to learn from them."
