Site:  The plant is situated on the Mississippi River in Plaquemine, LA.

Description of the Site: Georgia Gulf Chemical is a medium-sized producer of Chlorovinyls and Aromatics. 

Nature of the Opportunity: The GGC plant is a mature operation with a maintenance budget that was beginning to grow faster than sales.  A SAMI assessment of the operation, conducted with the help of the GGC operations and maintenance team revealed maintenance cost management opportunities in several areas, along with some opportunities for improvement in equipment availability.

• Emergency and urgent work was over 25% of the maintenance workload.
• Planning and scheduling of multiple business units was performed by home-grown methods that were not standardized over the plant site.
• Parts and supplies were not managed to produce timely availability of the parts required for repairs.  (Not surprising with the percentage of emergency and urgent work.)
• Utilization of the maintenance staff was well below world class.
• 72% of maintenance work was judged to be preventable by a variety of scheduling, PM, PdM, and operations improvements.

What We Did: In 2005 GGC management took the bold step of adjusting maintenance staff size to a lean configuration and retained SAMI to help develop and install a Work Management System that would allow them to run efficiently with the lean maintenance operation.  The system was designed to improve control of all maintenance work through the use of vastly improved tools and procedures.  These improvements include –

• Disciplined Work Identification and Prioritization Processes to clearly describe work, enter it into the data systems, and set it in proper priority relationships with other maintenance work
• Improved and standardized Planning and Scheduling Processes that make sure jobs are ready to be performed when they are scheduled and coordinate maintenance schedules with other activities in the business units
• Efficient Work Execution rules that maximize wrench time and minimize waste
• Improved Materials Management that minimizes the cost of keeping the right spares and supplies in the hands of maintenance when they are needed
• A Work Order Status system that keeps the organization abreast of progress on maintenance work and captures asset history to support reliability efforts

A cross-functional team of GGC staff, supported by SAMI consultants designed the new Work Management system and then installed it in the plant’s five business units.  The effort included ongoing change management training, as well as co-development of the technical features of the new system.  This enabled the technical implementation team to embed the cultural aspects of the Work Management system effectively and concurrently with the technical training. 

The effort was completed in early 2007.

Results:

GGC has been certified as Competent for Stage 1 Work Management, although there continues to be an opportunity to improve sustainability.  GGC’s new staffing program, along with improved control of the work, has yielded impressive financial benefits (See Figure 1 above).  Members of the Work Management project team now occupy leadership positions in their respective business units where they drive continuous improvement and maintain the progress they have created there.