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MRC Means Knowledge-Sharing Without Boundaries
Information Exchange Improves Equipment Reliability Across the Board
Each quarter, personnel representing production, maintenance and engineering at all of PotashCorp's nitrogen and phosphate plants get together to share vital information.
They're the members of the Manufacturing Reliability Council (MRC) and the information they share is critical to equipment maintenance and reliability, and ultimately to product quality, customer satisfaction and plant profitability.
Originally formed in 1998 for exchange of maintenance information among the company's nitrogen plants, the MRC was expanded in 2001 to include phosphate operations. At the same time, its focus expanded beyond maintenance to include turnaround planning, critical equipment contingency planning, compiling shutdown lists, equipment-condition monitoring, end-of-life plans, performance training and more.
The Manufacturing Reliability Council's 10-Point Plan identifies the key areas on which council members from each nitrogen and phosphate plant should focus.
"There's quite a mixed bag of equipment among plants," says Brent Heimann, Vice President of Operations for nitrogen and phosphate, "but there are valuable experiences and practices that they can share. For example, each plant has learned to compile a comprehensive shutdown list. Now when a piece of equipment goes down, the list provides a host of preventive and predictive maintenance tasks that can be completed while waiting for the equipment to be repaired. Instead of people wondering what to do next, the list tells them exactly what to do."
Similarly, the MRC has shared with each plant a list of "bad actors" — certain brands and types of equipment shown by experience to be unreliable, Heimann said.
"With the MRC, we've got a way to contact people who may know more than we do," said John Tennison, Maintenance Superintendent at Aurora. "For instance, we had a vibration issue with one of our main sulfuric acid turbines. So Bill Jones, one of my reliability engineers, calls Jose Tepedino, a reliability engineer at White Springs, and immediately gets suggestions on how to get our turbine back on track."
Geismar Plant Manager Hanson Leonard notes that the MRC sub-teams are the real key to solving problems.
"With sub-teams like VET (vessels and exchangers team) and RET (rotating equipment team), you've got specialists talking their own language to other specialists once a month via a conference call," he said. "This interchange of experiences and information has helped us establish company-wide guidelines that have really eliminated a lot of reliability problems."
With the MRC fostering so much dialogue between plants and peers, tacit knowledge is being turned into explicit knowledge to the benefit of all.
click to enlarge
Sub-teams make the difference in getting to the roots of reliability issues. Each sub-team is composed of employees at PotashCorp nitrogen and phosphate plants who speak the same technical language and can share ideas and questions quickly and efficiently.
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