Air Products Uses Lean Construction for Planned Outages, Paul Wood
September 23rd, 2005 by Hal[Notes from LCI's 7th Annual Lean Construction Congress]
Air Products operates plants that make The goal is to reduce the outage duration to the shortest time possible then hit that duration…no kidding! The plant straddles a rail link. The outage was planned to do control system modification. They were also adding automation throughout the process.
They planned a staged migration. They started with "outages of opportunities" to do as much work ahead of time as they could. They did the outage in 3 weeks rather than the usual 3 months.
Done meant done!
They designed the project using Last Planner techniques:
- People responsible for the work did the plan
- Gave their attention to handoffs rather than process
- Work was organized into packets with clear description of completion
- Sequenced the work using a pull process
They operated to a set of principles:
- Teams were autonomous. They worked to an irreversible level of completion. Done meant done!
- Daily workplans, one/phase/day
- Planning process
- Used a decoupling approach that aided in the debugging of the installation.
- Couldn't wait 'til the end of the process to do inspection. They could afford to build good work onto bad. They planned for immediate inspection when workers announced they were done.
- Punchlists are to be avoided. Inspectors are to communicate the standards for performance to the installation workers so they can pass inspections.
85% PPC (for Air Products) would have been a failure.
They regularly reviewed their workplans in a workshop format to coordinate among the crews. Each contractor had a daily workplan. They held shift-to-shift hand-off meetings with the last planners. The conversation focussed on what needed attention to stay on schedule. They achieved a 98.8% PPC. They refused to allow people to work ahead to avoid getting the work out of sequence. Planning for the 14 day outage took 3 months totaling about 500 hours.
The Air Products outage approach conforms to the language-action perspective.
What Did You Hear?
- Shooting for predictability rather than productivity
- Don't tap the keg before checking that the toilets flush
- Impressed with how quickly you got the last planners engaged
- Early on key people were brought in to make accurate promises kept in reasonable times
- They did everything possible in downtime to avoid the p
- People responsible for the work did the planning
- Don't work ahead or outside of the plan
- Struck by the level of detail…seemed more like a choreographed dance than a plan
- Team leader dedicated to each of the phases
- Inspectors encouraged to help the contractors succeed rather than catching them fail
- Classic example of the value of planning
- The notion of the irreversible level of completion
- Concentrating and discussing the handoffs causes planning to breakout
- Working on unapproved work is unsafe
Audience Questions
- Was it difficult to get the last planners involved early on?
- How did cost play into this?
- How did you establish the initial 21 day goal?
- Did you have a list of workable backlog?
- How many total man hours were involved?
- Was the effort to plan this way driven by the company?
- How is
- Look at extreme circumstances to predict the future. How did actual unit rates compare to your plan?
- What was the opportunity cost of doing the planning vs shutting down the plant?
- How many total activities did you manage?
- Could the inspection teams been replaced by self inspection?
- How did you provision the site?
Closing Comments
Steven Convey says, "Trust has two hats: the first is competence, the second is character." It's a helluva time in the middle of an outage to find out you have a snake in the grass. By working on the plan way ahead of time I got a feel for the guys I could count on.
It wasn't difficult getting last planners involved. We used the same individuals during the outage as we used for ongoing maintenace and operations.
We set the 21 day goal by looking at the pace of a long phase. We managed 800 activities taking about 7100 hours. Cost planning was done on a fixed unit price basis. The subs made more money than they expected and they went home early! They identified workable backlog prior to the outage, but didn't have one during the outage.
The project was done on the basis of "Let's see if we can do it?"
Greg Howell: Air Products has about $75 million of projects underway using LPS. They recently conducted a pull planning session prior to asking for the bids. In this case the company that knows the most won the bid.
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