Automating Maintenance Part of Seabrook''s Pursuit of Excellence: An MRO Software Case Study by Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book, April 1, 2003 To say that the Seabrook nuclear power station has had a tumultuous history is an understatement. The Boston Globe called it the place where nuclear power was stopped in its tracks. A half finished containment dome-construction was halted in 1984 by protests and costs overruns-for the second of two 1,160-MW reactors planned for the site serves as a monument to the social and economic problems the nuclear power industry could not overcome. However, a lot has changed for and at Seabrook since the 1980s. Today, the plant, which is one hour’s drive north of Boston and two miles inland of the New Hampshire coast, provides electricity for one million New England homes from its first and only unit. While memories of the protests and safety concerns surrounding the station still linger in the minds of local residents, many have been erased-or at least eased-by a long running program that commits the staff of Seabrook to strive for excellence. Called “Values For Excellence,” the program included an initiative to automate and thereby improve the maintenance elements of the plant’s work, safety, and materials management efforts and purchasing activities. Maintenance, Manual Following startup in 1990, Seabrook’s maintenance program used manual processes to catalog and store the station’s hundreds of thousands of labor records, job plans, work orders, equipment lists, and inventory items. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires all nuclear plants to meticulously maintain detailed records of all their activities and equipment, right down to the history of all materials used on site. Although many of the manual processes had been refined over the past decade, the explosion of information that needed to be stored called for a new approach, according to Greg Kann, Seabrook’s electronic work control project manager. He says that Seabrook wanted to do additional analysis and reporting, but couldn’t because the manual processes were far too slow and cumbersome. “One of our primary tactics had been to continuously improve the maintenance processes to world-class levels. But eventually we realized that that wouldn’t work, and that we needed to automate them,” explains Kann. User Acceptance Was Key Kann knew that to be successful, he needed to put in a system that was going to be flexible and act as a foundation for future enhancements. “I did not want to install an automated system and try to re-engineer the maintenance program at the same time,” he recalls. “We had been making process improvements all along, so a key objective of the new system was that it would not require re-engineering of existing processes. User acceptance of new systems is hard enough to achieve, and introducing new processes at the same time would have met great resistance,” says Kann. Another selection criterion for the system was that it be intuitive and use Windows-like navigation techniques, to minimize training time. In addition to meeting technical requirements, the automated system would also have to be accessible to 500 more people who could use it with minimal support. Many Were Called, One Was Chosen When Kann went shopping for a solution, he was pleased to find that several commercial products could do what was required. In the end, however, ease of use and the ability to be modified easily became the two most important selection criteria. As the 1990s drew to a close, Kann settled on Maximo 4.1 from MRO Software, Bedford, Mass. “Maximo is very intuitive and has built-in help features which address the user acceptance problem. What’s more, the system accommodates changes easily, has terrific reporting and analysis tools, and provides a strong foundation for future enhancements,” Kann says. A Smooth Implementation Implementation of Maximo began in January 2001 and was completed by last Thanksgiving. Kann personally installed its work order, equipment, job plan, inventory, preventive maintenance, and labor modules. He attributes the success of the overall project to plenty of upfront planning and user training. Populating the system’s data base seemed daunting at first, because the work records and other documents that had to be digitized and stored were voluminous, extremely detailed, and go back 15 years. Because the plan was to give access to Maximo to all personnel at Seabrook, the implementation had to be methodical and almost flawless so that it wouldn’t disrupt operation of the existing maintenance system, causing the new system to make a bad first impression on users. Looking back now, Kann calls the implementation “a tremendous success. We expect the help desk to be overwhelmed with calls the first week after going live, but that didn’t happen. All the hard work that went into planning and training really paid off, and users had and continue to have nothing but praise for the new system. Early Results Now that the system has been running for over three months, it is really beginning to shine. The population effort loaded the following into Maximo: • More than 500,00 work order records, each with more than 150 elements, for a total of 75-million pieces of data. • A total of 14,280 preventive maintenance tasks, each with an associated job plan. • Some 1,615 labor records and 104,512 location and equipment records, each with an average of 40 specifications. Says Kann, “We’re starting to see tangible improvements in our safety, performance, and maintenance processes. Users are particularly amazed at the software’s reporting capabilities, which allow them to access key performance indicator reports much more quickly. In addition, its more accurate scheduling functions have already served to reduce maintenance backlogs.” All work orders are created and stored electronically. What’s more, Seabrook can use a job plan library, which allows users to easily import saved plans into new work orders. We’re being sold? No Biggie As part of New Hampshire’s deregulation program, the consortium of utilities that owns Seabrook will sell the plant, most likely this year. With the pending sale, you might think that plans for enhancing the maintenance system would be on hold-but that’s not the case, according to Kann. “We still plan to install Maximo’s purchasing and inventory modules, and use the software’s linked document feature to hook the system up to a new electronic document management system currently in development.” As for the effect of the sale on staff working on the system, Kann has this to say. “We think having a world-class maintenance program will make Seabrook even more attractive to potential buyers. It’s just another example of the “Values For Excellence” philosophy that suffuses all our operations here at Seabrook.” by Jon Arnold Reprinted from EnergyIT, March/April 2002, copyright by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., with all rights reserved. This reprint implies no endorsement, either tacit or expressed, of any company, product, service or investment opportunity. Filed under: White Papers Tagged under: Utilities About the Author Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book Chris Trayhorn is the Chairman of the Performance Marketing Industry Blue Ribbon Panel and the CEO of mThink.com, a leading online and content marketing agency. He has founded four successful marketing companies in London and San Francisco in the last 15 years, and is currently the founder and publisher of Revenue+Performance magazine, the magazine of the performance marketing industry since 2002.