Christian Green reported that historically at many nuclear plants, lead engineers spend two-thirds of their time in service to their corrective action programs. Top managers also spend significant hours in the same domain. The high costs of so much time spent on issue resolution is compounded by the opportunity cost of diverting highly-skilled engineering resources away from valuable work such as creating process improvements or other value-added tasks.
The key to good customer service and economic health for electric generators is high equipment availability and reliability. Other than scheduled downtimes, generation assets need to be ready and running to fulfill their missions. Despite the technical sophistication and automation of equipment, recurring problems persistently result in downtime and increased cost around the industry. The contributing factor is poor problem solving. This is reflected in the mismanagement of both equipment and people.
Plant personnel are constantly engaged in the “fix it now” mode in order to restore operations as quickly as possible. The time required to think through issues is a luxury never given. As a result, future-focus is replaced by fire-fighting problem solving. Problems that could have been prevented occur, root cause is unexplored, problems are fixed only to recur with new, related problems arising that were caused by the fix. How do plants move away from this pattern?
Research shows that the best performing plants also have the best organizational cultures for problem solving. Plants that adopt a systematic approach to problem solving look at the overall situation surrounding an issue to find cause, define a corrective action and consider the implications of taking that action. The focus moves from fix it now to fix it right.
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