Posts made in October, 2011

Confusion in the facility…

Posted by on Oct 28, 2011 in Site Improvement | 0 comments

An operator at a critical facility entered the electrical distribution room. He started to isolate a part of the system for a routine maintenance in accordance with an approved procedure. When he actually turned the switch to isolate the system, a major portion of the facilities power was lost with a large portion of the supported customers. It was determined afterward that the operator actually entered the wrong distribution room, shutting down power to the wrong part of the facility. At a nuclear power plant, an operator following an approved procedure to perform maintenance on some instrumentation caused the reactor to scram, shutting down the plant. The operator mistakenly hooked up a test signal to the wrong instrumentation causing a power spike to be seen by the protective circuitry, causing the shutdown. Each of these incidents was caused by confusing labeling — the first by two identical electrical distribution rooms next to each other with very small labeling, the second by labeling that made it difficult to tell which system it belonged to. I have seen companies spend enormous time and effort on the design, procedures, and training; but when it came to labeling, almost no thought or effort was made in this area to eliminate risk. Labeling and system identification should be addressed during the design and construction, but unfortunately so many of our facilities were built without labeling being a priority. Lucky that labeling issues can be easily addressed post construction....

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Teach someone something every day!!!

Posted by on Oct 21, 2011 in Facilities Management, Leadership, Training | 0 comments

I have worked in the nuclear industry for over 20 years and one of the major tenets of the industry is training.  We train you when you first get here, we train constantly while you’re here, and we train you when anybody learns anything about anything relevant.  Needless to say, all this formal training costs.  It is not uncommon for the training budget to be one quarter of the operational costs of the site.  Training is mandated by law, regulations, and good practices.  After all who wants people operating nuclear power plants who are not properly trained? With all this training I had the opportunity to work with some of the highest trained and operationally ready people in the world.  It was a wonderful experience.  I support and believe that the consequences of failure demand this type of training routine and program. Most mission critical facilities organizations cannot afford to support this type and level of training. That is the hard reality of economics of our industry, so what can we do?...

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Risk mitigation

Posted by on Oct 14, 2011 in Leadership | 0 comments

Risk mitigation is the reason that mission critical facilities organizations exist.  Risk mitigation is one of the key differences in the operational philosophy of these organizations. Each person within the organization understands their place and how they and their actions support this operational imperative and philosophy. The last time I checked, there were several hundred companies purporting to do “mission critical facilities.”  While I know of many great companies that do this work on an outsourced basis, there are many companies that don’t seem to have a real grasp of what a mission critical facilities organization is or how to support it.  The most common error is thinking that a property management team that has been “upgraded” can properly operate a mission critical facility.  Because of this it is imperative that the company with needs in this area do their due diligence and ensure that the company they are trusting their business to has all the crucial elements in their program to be successful....

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