“Performance management is a myth.” Invensys/Foxboro Vice President and  General Manager of Performance Management

Peter Martin knows how to get your attention. By this statement, he means to shake up management and force the realization that improving manufacturing performance requires more than just buying a product. It requires using new technologies and tools while undertaking a culture change within operations to empower people in their quest to make plants more competitive and profitable.

“Performance management implementations are for the most part ineffective,” says Martin from his Foxboro, Mass., office, “and the issue is mindset. Managers believe they should manage, and that operators and engineers are to be told what to do. But minute-to-minute, managers of the plant’s processes are the operators. We need to convert operators and maintenance people into performance managers. We’ve got to get over management egos. They don’t want to empower people. Why, take a look at the design of control systems. It’s an operation by exception philosophy. You only notify the operator if the process is going

Provide the tools

Switching sports but carrying through with the theme, Martin likens operating a plant to coaching a team sport such as soccer. First, the team knows that the goal of the game is to win. There’s a scoreboard where everyone gets instant feedback as to their status relative to the goal. The coach develops a strategy and recruits players, then trains the players, providing the skills and information they will need to succeed.

At game time, it is the responsibility of the coach to put the correct mix of players on the field to play the game. The game is won or lost, though, through the creativity, teamwork and efforts of the players. Manufacturing managers need to learn from this model and do similar things. That is, they must recruit and train personnel, put the correct people in the proper positions and provide the information they need to be successful.

Despite shortfalls of the past, there are growing signs that things are changing for the better in manufacturing plants around the world, however, as leaders do try to make the modifications in technology and organization that will lead to optimum performance. Sometimes, the efforts seem a little low key, but the payoffs have been large so far—and the potential payoffs down the road as more technology develops are huge.

Sometimes, you have to take basic steps to eventually reach performance excellence. One example can be seen at a medium-sized Western U.S. chemical plant that asked not to be named.

The process operations supervisor at this plant describes a control system containing about 8,000 input/output (I/O) points in four operation areas. His problem was too many alarms. His four operators dealt with up to 8,000 alarms per day per operation area. The alarms came so quickly that they scrolled on the display such that the operators couldn’t even see them, let alone react.

The supervisor initially started to work on the problem by assigning someone to analyze the alarms and look for root causes, with an eye toward eliminating the spurious alarms and solving the underlying problems that triggered the important ones. He discovered quickly, however, that one person working full time couldn’t make a dent in the problem, and that the budget was stretched with the extra hours.

Alarm analysis

Working with Yokogawa, a process systems supplier with U.S. headquarters in Houston, the supervisor found a technology solution for his alarm problem. Yokogawa’s Advanced Alarm Administrator Suite brought order to the confusion. The software has alarm analysis tools with statistics on tags that generate the most problems. An operator can look at a display, quickly identify the problem and devise a solution. The software also has an alarm suppression function that detects if a sensor is chattering in and out of alarm, sending multiple messages, and filters the alarms displayed.

“Our goal was to get the alarm total down to 288 alarms per operator per day,” says the supervisor, “and in the first 90 days, we saw an 88 percent reduction in ...