Efficient Maintenance means Practice, Practice, Practice

While diving down a YouTube hole last night, I came across this video, “Fastest Pit Stop Award: 2016 Formula 1.” Notice how everyone knows their position and actions down pat.

Then YouTube brought me to this video, “Pit Stop Fails of All Time”. I would bring particular attention to the one at 3:15. The link should jump you right there. Notice how one slip up can have disastrous consequences.

It got me thinking about my business, refining and in particular delayed coking. In the delayed coker, we have a very specific and often quite short maintenance time window during each cycle to get something fixed. If that wasn’t complicated enough, that time window is a moving target based on cut times or other unit conditions.

Some units we work with have detailed maintenance plans broken down by timeline, craft, spare parts, and tools required for certain critical jobs that we can expect on a DCU. It is literally a play book that has been practiced and sits on the maintenance planner’s shelf ready to be executed at a moment’s notice.

A perfect example of this is a broken cutting tool. Let’s say it sticks in the intermediate position or gets jammed with coke fines…. that could never happen, right? How long would it take to change at your plant? Best I have seen is less than 1 hour from the time it is diagnosed until cutting resumes.