Power Plant “We’ve Got the Power” Program
Originally posted March 14, 2014:
Early January, 1990 the entire maintenance shop at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma was called to the break room which doubled as our main conference room in order to attend an important meeting. We watched as a new program was explained to us. It was a program called “We’ve Got the Power”. It centered around the idea that the best people who knew how to improve the operation of the plant were the people that worked there every day… The employees. When it was over, we were all given an Igloo Lunch box just for attending the meeting. We were also promised a lot more prizes in the future for participating in the program.
“We’ve Got the Power” Igloo Lunch Box
In order to participate further, we needed to sign up on a team. Preferably the team would be cross-functional, because, as they explained, a cross-functional team usually could come up with the most creative ideas for improving things at the plant. Once we signed up for the team each member on the team was given a gray windbreaker.
A windbreaker like this, only gray. The “We’ve Got the Power” logo was in the same place as this logo
I don’t have an actual picture of the windbreaker I was given. I wore it to work for a number of months until we found out that the material was highly flammable and that it was not safe for us to wear it on the job. We were supposed to wear only flame retardant clothing. I kept the jacket for 15 years, but the jacket was made with material that disintegrated over time, and one day when I pulled it out of the closet to wear it, I found that it was literally falling apart on the hanger. I had no choice but to throw it away.
There were some interesting reactions to this program. I thought the program was a great idea and couldn’t wait until it began in order to submit our ideas for improving the plant. Others decided for some reason that they didn’t want to have any part in the program. Most of the Power Plant Men were eager to take part.
So, here’s how it worked. We had about 5 weeks to prepare our first ideas to submit to steering committee, which consisted of our plant manager Ron Kilman, the assistant plant manager Ben Brandt and I believe the Engineering Supervisor Jim Arnold. I don’t remember for sure if Jim Arnold was on the steering committee. We could only submit three ideas. At any given time, we could only have three ideas in the pipeline. Once a decision had been made about that idea, then we could submit another one.
I was the leader of the team that we assembled. It consisted of the following electricians besides myself: Scott Hubbard, Charles Foster and Terry Blevins. One mechanic Jody Morse. We also had two people from the warehouse on our team: Dick Dale and Darlene Mitchell. Here are their pictures:
Terry Blevins
Charles Foster
Scott Hubbard
Jody Morse
Darlene Mitchell
Richard Dale many years later
I was somehow the luckiest guy in the plant to have some of the best brain power on my team. I will go into some of our ideas in a later post. Actually, I think I will have to have at least two more posts to completely cover this topic. For now, I just want to explain how this program worked and maybe share a thing or two about our team.
If one of the ideas we submitted was approved to be implemented, then we would receive an number of award points that was consistent with the amount of money the idea would save the company in one year. If it wasn’t a money saving idea or you couldn’t figure out how to calculate the savings, then there was a set amount of points that would be granted to the team. Each team member would receive the same number of points as everyone else on the team. Each person would receive the full savings of the idea.
We were given a catalog from a company called Maritz Inc. This is a company that specializes in employee motivation. They have been around a long time, and the gifts in the catalog ranged from small items such as a toaster, all the way up to pretty large pieces of furniture and other big items. I challenge the Power Plant Men who read this blog that were heavily involved in this program to leave a comment with the types of prizes they picked from this catalog.
The rules for the program were very specific, and there was a healthy (and in some cases, not so healthy) competition that ensued during the event. Once we were able to submit our ideas, we had 13 weeks to turn in all of our ideas. Keeping in mind that you could only have 3 ideas in the pipeline at a time. (well… they bent that rule at the last minute. — I’m sure Ron Kilman was thrilled about that).
I mentioned Ron Kilman, because for the entire 13 weeks and probably beyond, Ron (our plant manager) was sort of sequestered in his office reviewing the hundreds of ideas that were being turned in. At first some mistakes were made, and then there were attempts to correct those, and you can imagine that it was sort of organized (or disorganized) chaos for a while.
I will go into our ideas in a later post, but I will say that despite the fact that a good deal of our points were incorrectly allocated to other teams, we still came out in second place at our plant, and in sixth place in the company. Only the top 5 teams were able to go to Hawaii, and we were only a few points behind the fifth place team. So, all in all, I think our team was happy with our progress. Especially since we knew that over 200,000 of our points, were mistakenly given away and never corrected. Which would have made us close to 2nd place company-wide. Our team had no hard feelings when it was over. We felt that for the effort that we put into it, we were well rewarded.
In the middle of this program, my daughter was born and so a lot of my points went to purchasing things like a play pen, a baby swing, and a large assortment of baby toys. I had been such a miser in my marriage up to this point so that the majority of the furniture in our house had been purchased in Ponca City garage sales early on Saturday mornings. I had the idea that for the first few years of our marriage, we would live real cheap, and then work our way up gradually. That way, we would always feel like we were moving up in the world. The first house that we rented in Ponca City was a little dumpy old house for $250 per month.
The house we rented in Ponca City, Oklahoma
I had been married for 4 years by the time this program rolled around, and when the first few boxes of prizes had just arrived at our house, one Sunday in April, a priest came to the house we were renting on Sixth Street in Stillwater, Oklahoma to bless the house.
House we rented in Stillwater
When he walked in and saw a large box leaning against the wall in the living room, and not a stitch of furniture, he asked us if we were moving. I asked him what he meant. He said, “Well, you don’t have any furniture.” I said, “Oh. No. We’re not moving. We just have the furniture in the other room” (which was a spare bedroom that we used as the computer room. That was where our old couch was along with an old coffee table (both of which had been given to me by my friend Tim Flowers).
From this program I was able to furnish my entire living room. I had a nice sofa (with a fold out bed), a new coffee table with two matching end tables. All of them good quality. Through the years, we have replaced the sofa and the coffee table. I also had two Lazy Boys, which I still own, but we keep in the game room:
Two Lazy-Boys received as an award from the “We’ve Got the Power” program
The biggest prize I purchased from this program was a real nice Thomasville Dining room table and chairs:
Dining Room Table received as an award from the “We’ve Got The Power” program
Two of the chairs are missing because they are across the street in my parents house (on loan).
So, you see, you could get some really nice prizes from this program. The furniture came along just at the time my family was beginning to grow.
When we were originally forming our team Ron Kilman’s secretary, Linda Shiever had joined our team. We had signed her up and had even held our first meeting. Then one day she came to me and told me that she was going to be a part of the steering committee. She was pretty excited about this because she figured that the steering committee, with all their hard work would be well off when it came to prizes. So, we wished her well.
Linda Shiever
During the program it turned out that the team that had the most work to do was the steering committee. They worked day and night on this program. They basically gave up their day job to focus solely on this program for those 13 weeks. As it turned out, they were the least compensated as far as awards went. So, it was turning out that Linda had left our team, which was raking in the points, to go to a team that was barely receiving any points.
When the time came to implement the projects that were selected, the foreman that was over the team that was going to implement an idea would receive a percentage of the award points for doing the implementation. I remember my foreman Andy Tubbs (who was on the winning team at our plant), coming to us and telling us that we were to go implement some ideas and that he was going to be receiving award points while we went to actually do the work. — It was just one of those interesting rules in this program.
Andy Tubbs, being the true Power Plant Man that he was, said this didn’t set too well with him. So, what he decided to do was spend the points that he was awarded for implementing ideas on prizes for the employees to use in the electric shop. I remember that he had purchased various different items that came in handy for us in the shop. I don’t remember off-hand what they were. If one of the electricians would leave a comment below to remind me… that would be great.
So. I was bothered by the idea that Linda Shiever had been coaxed onto her team with visions of grandeur, only to find out (like Ron found out), that all their hard work was not going to be compensated at a reasonable level. I never blamed Ron Kilman for this, because it made sense that Linda should be on that team anyway, since she spent her day in Ron’s office and he did need someone to help with the enormous amount of paperwork. So, I decided to help her out.
Two of our biggest ideas had been approved to save the company over $315,000 each per year (when we tracked it the following year, it ended up with a savings of $345,000). In order to implement the idea, I believe the implementer would receive either a half or a third of the points. So, I thought of a way to have Linda Shiever be the implementer of the idea.
I remember explaining to Ron Kilman that in order to implement this idea, since it mainly consisted of a process change to how the precipitator is powered up during start-up, we just needed someone that could type up the procedures so that we could place them in our precipitator manuals. I suggested that Linda Shiever would be the best person to type up the procedure. And that is what happened. She received the award points for implementing our biggest idea.
When it was all said and done, the company was able to quickly save a lot of money, and in some cases increase revenue. I think the biggest idea at our plant from the winning team came from Larry Kuennen who figured out a way to change the way the boiler was fired that greatly increased the efficiency. This one idea probably made the entire program worth the effort that everyone went through.
It’s amazing what happens when you add a little extra motivation. Great things can happen.
Comments from the Orignal Post:
Power Plant Farm Fixing and Risk Management
We were told at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma that we were going to have to stop doing the excellent job we were used to doing. We no longer had time to make everything perfect. We just had to patch things together enough so that it was fixed and leave it at that. Jasper Christensen told us that we were going to have to “Farm Fix” things and work harder because we now only had half the employees.
Jasper Christensen
Two things bothered me right away….
First, “Work Harder.” What exactly does that mean? How does one work harder? When I pick up my tool bucket to go work on a job, should I put some extra bricks in it so that it is harder to carry? What then? Think about it… Shouldn’t we be working “Smarter” instead of “Harder”? We were all hard workers (if that means, spending a good 8 hour day doing your job). Any slackers were laid off 7 years earlier.
When I heard “Farm Fixing” I took offense to the reference. Jasper had mentioned using baling wire to hold something up instead of taking the time to make our jobs look pretty. As if baling wire was somehow synonymous with “Farm Fixing”. My grandfather was a farmer…. I’ll talk about that in a bit….
Jasper also informed us that we were no longer stuck doing only our own trade. So, an electrician should expect to help out as a mechanic or a welder as long as it wasn’t too involved. Certain welding jobs, for instance, require a certified welder. If the job was just to tack weld up a bracket somewhere, then I, as an electrician, could wheel a welding machine over there and weld it up.
After that initial meeting after we had been downsized to pint-sized, we met with our own teams. Alan Kramer was my new foreman. He encouraged us to learn the different skills from our teammates.
Alan Kramer
I asked Ed Shiever to teach me how to weld. After about an hour, I decided I wasn’t too interested in melting metal using electricity. I would leave it to the experts. I was left with a sunburned chest, as I usually wore a V-Neck Tee Shirt in the summer.
Ed Shiever Welder Extraordinaire
Jody Morse was a mechanic on our team, who had been a friend of mine since I was a janitor. We had been on the labor crew together. He asked me if he could do some electrical work with me. He thought it would be a useful skill to learn. I happily agreed to let him work alongside me running conduit and pulling wire around the precipitator hoppers.
Jody Morse
It wouldn’t include working on any circuits where he might accidentally come into contact with anything live. So, I thought this was a good starting point. That was one of the first skills I learned as an electrician-in-training when I was taught by Gene Roget, a master of conduit bending.
I showed Jody how to bend the conduit and have it end up being the right length with the curves in the right place (which is a little tricky at first). Then I showed Jody where the conduit needed to go, and where the wire needed to end up. He said he wanted to do this all by himself, so I left him to it and left to do something else.
A little while later, Jody came back and said he had a slight problem. He had cut the cable just a little bit too short (Yeah. I had done that myself, see the post: “When Enough Power Plant Stuff Just Ain’t Enough“). I looked at the problem with him, and he was about six inches too short.
Jody looked the job over and decided he had two options. Pull some new longer cable, or try to make the existing cable work.He figured out that if he cut off 6 inches of the conduit, and sort of bent it out so that it was no longer exactly at 90 degrees, then it would still reach where it needed to go, only the conduit wouldn’t look so pretty because the conduit would appear a little cockeyed. We figured this would be all right because Jasper had just finished telling us that we needed to make things not so pretty anymore. Jody finished the job, and filled out the Maintenance Order indicating that the job was done.
The cable and conduit job had been requested by Ron Madron, one of the Instrument and Controls guys on our team. When he went out and looked at the conduit, let’s just say that he wasn’t too impressed. He went to Alan Kramer and complained that the conduit job was disgraceful. I don’t remember his exact words, but when I heard about it, it sounded to me like he said “It was an abomination to all things electrical”.
I had always taken pride in my work, and doing a “sloppy” job was not normal for me. I didn’t want Jody to feel bad about this because he was pretty proud of having completed the job all by himself without my help. So I went and had a one-on-one with Ron and explained the situation to him. I also told him that the next time he has problem with something I did, come directly and talk to me about it instead of our foreman. We’re all on the same team now.
I think once he realized the situation, he was more receptive. Jody and I did go back out there and fix the issue by running a new cable that was long enough, with a new piece of conduit that was installed with the best of care so that it looked pretty. — None of us informed Jasper that behind his back we were still performing our jobs with great care and precision.
Conduit Bending Basics
The more I thought about the idea of “Farm Fixing” and “Risk Management” and how it was being applied at our plant, after about a year, I wrote a letter to the Superintendent over all the Power Plants, Jack Coffman.
Here is the letter I wrote (It was titled “Farm Fixing and Risk Management” — appropriate, don’t you think?):
Dear Jack Coffman,
I went through the Root Learning Class on Friday, September 6. After the class our table remained to discuss with Bruce Scambler the situation that exists at the power plants concerning the way we maintain our equipment. We attempted to discuss our concerns with our facilitator, however, the canyon depicted in the first visual became more and more evident the further we discussed it.
The Canyon Root Learning Map
My two concerns are the terms “Farm Fixing” and “Risk Management”. These are two good processes which I believe must be employed if we are to compete in an open market. I do believe, however, that our management has misunderstood their true meaning and has turned them into catch phrases that are something totally different than they were originally intended.
I come from a family of farmers. My father and grandfather were farmers. I was concerned about our use of the term “Farm-fixed”, so I discussed the way we were using it in our company with my father and I have confirmed my understanding of the term.
My grandfather as a farmer was a Welder, a Blacksmith, a Carpenter, and an Engine Mechanic. When a piece of machinery broke down while he was out harvesting or plowing a field, it is true that baling wire and a quick fix was needed to continue the work for the day. There is a small window of opportunity when harvesting and the equipment had to be running during this time or the farmer’s livelihood was at stake.
That evening, however, the piece that broke was reworked and re-machined until it was better than the original store bought item. Thus guaranteeing that it wouldn’t break down the following day. If the repairs took all night to make it right, they would stay up all night repairing it correctly. It was vital to their livelihood to have their machinery running as well as possible.
A Ford Tractor soon became my grandfather’s tractor as the original factory parts were replaced with more sturdy parts. It wasn’t repainted (gold-plated), because they weren’t planning on selling their equipment. The tractors and plows would last years longer than originally designed. All this was before farming became a subsidized industry.
We need to “Farm-Fix” our equipment. Our management however, focuses on the use of baling wire during an emergency and replaces the true meaning of Farm-Fixing with the meaning of “Jerry-Rigging”. Which is merely a temporary fix while farming and is NOT farm-fixing something. We have been maintaining our plant with quick fixes and have not been farm-fixing them. If so, our equipment would be more reliable, and would last longer than originally intended.
Risk Management is another area that has been misunderstood by our management. They have gone to school and have been trained in Risk Management. I don’t believe they are using their tools in the way that they were taught. They have taken the underlying idea that we may not need to make a change or repair a certain piece of equipment at this particular time and have made it the center of their idea of Risk Management. Risk Management is more than that. It is weighing the consequences of both actions against the cost and making an informed decision to determine the timing of maintenance.
Risk Management at our plant has become nothing more than speculation, or what I call “Wish Management”. The decision is often made based on the immediate cost and downtime to delay maintenance without properly identifying the possible damage that could occur and the cost of that scenario.
The phrase “It’s run that way this long, it will probably be all right” is used to justify not repairing the equipment. No real analysis is done. Then we cross our fingers and “Wish” that it will continue running forever.
I believe in the concepts of Risk Management and Farm-fixing. I think they are processes that should be used in our company to achieve and maintain “Best-In-Class”. I am concerned, however, that if we continue on the course that we are on where “Wishing” and “Jerry-rigging” are our processes, it will only be a matter of time before our workers get killed and our plants melt down around us.
Kevin Breazile
Sooner Station
— End of the letter. See? I was always trying to stir things up.
The first summer I worked at the Power Plant as a summer help, we had a couple of floor drain covers in the maintenance shop that were missing from the floor drains. Plywood had been used to cover the drains, which had been smashed down by the heavy equipment that traveled in and out of the shop. One day during lunch I wrote a Maintenance Order to have the floor drain covers replaced and placed it on Marlin McDaniel’s (the only A Foreman at the time) desk. I was only an 18 year old kid that was just learning my way around in the world and already stirring things up, but I figured this was an accident waiting to happen.
The very next day, a plant mechanic, Tom Dean stepped onto one of those floor drains while carrying a heavy ladder and seriously hurt his back. It was a life changing event for Tom that immediately changed his career. The next day, the drains had new covers. I talked about this in the post: “Power Plant Safety is Job Number One”
Approximately one year after I wrote the Farm-fixing and Risk Management letter to Jack Coffman, we had a major incident at the power plant that was directly caused by the decision not to replace a coupling when it was known to be faulty (risk management, they called it). It would have required extending an overhaul a day or two. Instead, after half of the T-G floor burned to the ground and the plant was offline for about 3 months. Millions of dollars of damage. That is a story for another post.
Power Plant “We’ve Got the Power” Program
Originally posted March 14, 2014:
Early January, 1990 the entire maintenance shop at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma was called to the break room which doubled as our main conference room in order to attend an important meeting. We watched as a new program was explained to us. It was a program called “We’ve Got the Power”. It centered around the idea that the best people who knew how to improve the operation of the plant were the people that worked there every day… The employees. When it was over, we were all given an Igloo Lunch box just for attending the meeting. We were also promised a lot more prizes in the future for participating in the program.
“We’ve Got the Power” Igloo Lunch Box
In order to participate further, we needed to sign up on a team. Preferably the team would be cross-functional, because, as they explained, a cross-functional team usually could come up with the most creative ideas for improving things at the plant. Once we signed up for the team each member on the team was given a gray windbreaker.
A windbreaker like this, only gray. The “We’ve Got the Power” logo was in the same place as this logo
I don’t have an actual picture of the windbreaker I was given. I wore it to work for a number of months until we found out that the material was highly flammable and that it was not safe for us to wear it on the job. We were supposed to wear only flame retardant clothing. I kept the jacket for 15 years, but the jacket was made with material that disintegrated over time, and one day when I pulled it out of the closet to wear, I found that it was literally falling apart on the hanger. I had no choice but to throw it away.
There were some interesting reactions to this program. I thought the program was a great idea and couldn’t wait until it began in order to submit our ideas for improving the plant. Others decided for some reason that they didn’t want to have any part in the program. Most of the Power Plant Men were eager to take part.
So, here’s how it worked. We had about 5 weeks to prepare our first ideas to submit to steering committee, which consisted of our plant manager Ron Kilman, the assistant plant manager Ben Brandt and I believe the Engineering Supervisor Jim Arnold. I don’t remember for sure if Jim Arnold was on the steering committee. We could only submit three ideas. At any given time, we could only have three ideas in the pipeline. Once a decision had been made about that idea, then we could submit another one.
I was the leader of the team that we assembled. It consisted of the following electricians besides myself: Scott Hubbard, Charles Foster and Terry Blevins. One mechanic Jody Morse. We also had two people from the warehouse on our team: Dick Dale and Darlene Mitchell. Here are their pictures:
Terry Blevins
Charles Foster
Scott Hubbard
Jody Morse
Darlene Mitchell
Richard Dale many years later
I was somehow the luckiest guy in the plant to have some of the best brain power on my team. I will go into some of our ideas in a later post. Actually, I think I will have to have at least two more posts to completely cover this topic. For now, I just want to explain how this program worked and maybe share a thing or two about our team.
If one of the ideas we submitted was approved to be implemented, then we would receive an number of award points that was consistent with the amount of money the idea would save the company in one year. If it wasn’t a money saving idea or you couldn’t figure out how to calculate the savings, then there was a set amount of points that would be granted to the team. Each team member would receive the same number of points as everyone else on the team. Each person would receive the full savings of the idea.
We were given a catalog from a company called Maritz Inc. This is a company that specializes in employee motivation. They have been around a long time, and the gifts in the catalog ranged from small items such as a toaster, all the way up to pretty large pieces of furniture and other big items. I challenge the Power Plant Men who read this blog that were heavily involved in this program to leave a comment with the types of prizes they picked from this catalog.
The rules for the program were very specific, and there was a healthy (and in some cases, not so healthy) competition that ensued during the event. Once we were able to submit our ideas, we had 13 weeks to turn in all of our ideas. Keeping in mind that you could only have 3 ideas in the pipeline at a time. (well… they bent that rule at the last minute. — I’m sure Ron Kilman was thrilled about that).
I mentioned Ron Kilman, because for the entire 13 weeks and probably beyond, Ron (our plant manager)was sort of sequestered in his office reviewing the hundreds of ideas that were being turned in. At first some mistakes were made, and then there were attempts to correct those, and you can imagine that it was sort of organized (or disorganized) chaos for a while.
I will go into our ideas in a later post, but I will say that despite the fact that a good deal of our points were incorrectly allocated to other teams, we still came out in second place at our plant, and in sixth place in the company. Only the top 5 teams were able to go to Hawaii, and we were only a few points behind the fifth place team. So, all in all, I think our team was happy with our progress. Especially since we knew that over 200,000 of our points, were mistakenly given away and never corrected. Which would have made us close to 2nd place companywide. Our team had no hard feelings when it was over. We felt that for the effort that we put into it, we were well rewarded.
In the middle of this program, my daughter was born and so a lot of my points went to purchasing things like a play pen, a baby swing, and a large assortment of baby toys. I had been such a miser in my marriage up to this point so that the majority of the furniture in our house had been purchased in Ponca City garage sales early on Saturday mornings. I had the idea that for the first few years of our marriage, we would live real cheap, and then work our way up gradually. That way, we would always feel like we were moving up in the world. The first house that we rented in Ponca City was a little dumpy old house for $250 per month.
The house we rented in Ponca City, Oklahoma
I had been married for 4 years by the time this program rolled around, and when the first few boxes of prizes had just arrived at our house, one Sunday in April, a priest came to the house we were renting on Sixth Street in Stillwater, Oklahoma to bless the house.
House we rented in Stillwater
When he walked in and saw a large box leaning against the wall in the living room, and not a stitch of furniture, he asked us if we were moving. I asked him what he meant. He said, “Well, you don’t have any furniture.” I said, “Oh. No. We’re not moving. We just have the furniture in the other room” (which was a spare bedroom that we used as the computer room. That was where our old couch was along with an old coffee table (both of which had been given to me by my friend Tim Flowers).
From this program I was able to furnish my entire living room. I had a nice sofa (with a fold out bed), a new coffee table with two matching end tables. All of them good quality. Through the years, we have replaced the sofa and the coffee table. I also had two Lazy Boys, which I still own, but we keep in the game room:
Two Lazy-Boys received as an award from the “We’ve Got the Power” program
The biggest prize I purchased from this program was a real nice Thomasville Dining room table and chairs:
Dining Room Table received as an award from the “We’ve Got The Power” program
Two of the chairs are missing because they are across the street in my parents house (on loan).
So, you see, you could get some really nice prizes from this program. The furniture came along just at the time my family was beginning to grow.
When we were originally forming our team Ron Kilman’s secretary, Linda Shiever had joined our team. We had signed her up and had even held our first meeting. Then one day she came to me and told me that she was going to be a part of the steering committee. She was pretty excited about this because she figured that the steering committee, with all their hard work would be well off when it came to prizes. So, we wished her well.
Linda Shiever
During the program it turned out that the team that had the most work to do was the steering committee. They worked day and night on this program. They basically gave up their day job to focus solely on this program for those 13 weeks. As it turned out, they were the least compensated as far as awards went. So, it was turning out that Linda had left our team, which was raking in the points, to go to a team that was barely receiving any points.
When the time came to implement the projects that were selected, the foreman that was over the team that was going to implement an idea would receive a percentage of the award points for doing the implementation. I remember my foreman Andy Tubbs (who was on the winning team at our plant), coming to us and telling us that we were to go implement some ideas and that he was going to be receiving award points while we went to actually do the work. — It was just one of those interesting rules in this program.
Andy Tubbs, being the true Power Plant Man that he was, said this didn’t set too well with him. So, what he decided to do was spend the points that he was awarded for implementing ideas on prizes for the employees to use in the electric shop. I remember that he had purchased various different items that came in handy for us in the shop. I don’t remember off-hand what they were. If one of the electricians would leave a comment below to remind me… that would be great.
So. I was bothered by the idea that Linda Shiever had been coaxed onto her team with visions of grandeur, only to find out (like Ron found out), that all their hard work was not going to be compensated at a reasonable level. I never blamed Ron Kilman for this, because it made sense that Linda should be on that team anyway, since she spent her day in Ron’s office and he did need someone to help with the enormous amount of paperwork. So, I decided to help her out.
Two of our biggest ideas had been approved to save the company over $315,000 each per year (when we tracked it the following year, it ended up with a savings of $345,000). In order to implement the idea, I believe the implementer would receive either a half or a third of the points. So, I thought of a way to have Linda Shiever be the implementer of the idea.
I remember explaining to Ron Kilman that in order to implement this idea, since it mainly consisted of a process change to how the precipitator is powered up during start-up, we just needed someone that could type up the procedures so that we could place them in our precipitator manuals. I suggested that Linda Shiever would be the best person to type up the procedure. And that is what happened. She received the award points for implementing our biggest idea.
When it was all said and done, the company was able to quickly save a lot of money, and in some cases increase revenue. I think the biggest idea at our plant from the winning team came from Larry Kuennen who figured out a way to change the way the boiler was fired that greatly increased the efficiency. This one idea probably made the entire program worth the effort that everyone went through.
It’s amazing what happens when you add a little extra motivation. Great things can happen.
Comments from the Orignal Post:
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If I remember correctly, Jasper Christensen was the 3rd member of Sooner’s IAC (Idea Action Committee). I think Jim Arnold got to go to Hawaii with his team. This was the most intense, long-term, difficult (personally and inter-company relationships) program of my entire working career. Whoever decided it was fair competition for the Power Plants to compete with the other corporate departments (like the Regions, Accounting, Customer Service, Human Resources, etc.) with cost reduction as the measurement, really blew it. Power Production is where the largest potential existed for cost reduction by at least an order of magnitude. The Plant Managers took a lot of grief from the other Managers (“rigged”, “not fair”, “you guys cooked the books”, “there’s no way”, etc.).
Sooner Plant won the over-all competition with the highest idea approval rate of any company location (19 total locations). We had audited net savings of $2.1 million/year. Reduction in “Station Power” alone accounted for a revenue increase of $7 million during 1993. We (the IAC) worked many nights, weekends, and took work home. I was proud of the way Sooner teams really got after it. It was a huge success for OG&E.
The rewards I remember getting were a tread mill, a small sharpening wheel, and a CD player. My jacket fell apart too.
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Thanks Ron. I clearly remember how much time your team had to put into this effort. It was hardest on your team because you didn’t have a choice where the rest of us did.
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That’s too bad about the 200,000 points…but it sounds like you were very good about that, considering. Nice job getting that sweet furniture. It IS AMAZING what can be done with some teamwork and incentive to make an idea work. So glad to see you all did so well.
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FINALLY—An incentive program offering something more substantial than free pizza! 🙂Despite the mix-up in points, you worked for a decent company!!!! 🙂
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I remember Dad getting a sleeper sofa, and we all got some nice binoculars and a lot of other items it seems. I don’t know what all Andy got for the electrical shop but I know one was an electric knife that is still there with the logo on it I believe.
Power Plant Farm Fixing and Risk Management
We were told at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma that we were going to have to stop doing the excellent job we were used to doing. We no longer had time to make everything perfect. We just had to patch things together enough so that it was fixed and leave it at that. Jasper Christensen told us that we were going to have to “Farm Fix” things and work harder because we now only had half the employees.
Jasper Christensen
Two things bothered me right away….
First, “Work Harder.” What exactly does that mean? How does one work harder? When I pick up my tool bucket to go work on a job, should I put some extra bricks in it so that it is harder to carry? What then? Think about it… Shouldn’t we be working “Smarter” instead of “Harder”? We were all hard workers (if that means, spending a good 8 hour day doing your job). Any slackers were laid off 7 years earlier.
When I heard “Farm Fixing” I took offense to the reference. Jasper had mentioned using baling wire to hold something up instead of taking the time to make our jobs look pretty. As if baling wire was somehow synonymous with “Farm Fixing”. My grandfather was a farmer…. I’ll talk about that in a bit….
Jasper also informed us that we were no longer stuck doing only our own trade. So, an electrician should expect to help out as a mechanic or a welder as long as it wasn’t too involved. Certain welding jobs, for instance, require a certified welder. If the job was just to tack weld up a bracket somewhere, then I, as an electrician, could wheel a welding machine over there and weld it up.
After that initial meeting after we had been downsized to pint-sized, we met with our own teams. Alan Kramer was my new foreman. He encouraged us to learn the different skills from our teammates.
Alan Kramer
I asked Ed Shiever to teach me how to weld. After about an hour, I decided I wasn’t too interested in melting metal using electricity. I would leave it to the experts. I was left with a sunburned chest, as I usually wore a V-Neck Tee Shirt in the summer.
Ed Shiever Welder Extraordinaire
Jody Morse was a mechanic on our team, who had been a friend of mine since I was a janitor. We had been on the labor crew together. He asked me if he could do some electrical work with me. He thought it would be a useful skill to learn. I happily agreed to let him work alongside me running conduit and pulling wire around the precipitator hoppers.
Jody Morse
It wouldn’t include working on any circuits where he might accidentally come into contact with anything live. So, I thought this was a good starting point. That was one of the first skills I learned as an electrician-in-training when I was taught by Gene Roget, a master of conduit bending.
I showed Jody how to bend the conduit and have it end up being the right length with the curves in the right place (which is a little tricky at first). Then I showed Jody where the conduit needed to go, and where the wire needed to end up. He said he wanted to do this all by himself, so I left him to it and left to do something else.
A little while later, Jody came back and said he had a slight problem. He had cut the cable just a little bit too short (Yeah. I had done that myself, see the post: “When Enough Power Plant Stuff Just Ain’t Enough“). I looked at the problem with him, and he was about six inches too short.
Jody looked the job over and decided he had two options. Pull some new longer cable, or try to make the existing cable work.He figured out that if he cut off 6 inches of the conduit, and sort of bent it out so that it was no longer exactly at 90 degrees, then it would still reach where it needed to go, only the conduit wouldn’t look so pretty because the conduit would appear a little cockeyed. We figured this would be all right because Jasper had just finished telling us that we needed to make things not so pretty anymore. Jody finished the job, and filled out the Maintenance Order indicating that the job was done.
The cable and conduit job had been requested by Ron Madron, one of the Instrument and Controls guys on our team. When he went out and looked at the conduit, let’s just say that he wasn’t too impressed. He went to Alan Kramer and complained that the conduit job was disgraceful. I don’t remember his exact words, but when I heard about it, it sounded to me like he said “It was an abomination to all things electrical”.
I had always taken pride in my work, and doing a “sloppy” job was not normal for me. I didn’t want Jody to feel bad about this because he was pretty proud of having completed the job all by himself without my help. So I went and had a one-on-one with Ron and explained the situation to him. I also told him that the next time he has problem with something I did, come directly and talk to me about it instead of our foreman. We’re all on the same team now.
I think once he realized the situation, he was more receptive. Jody and I did go back out there and fix the issue by running a new cable that was long enough, with a new piece of conduit that was installed with the best of care so that it looked pretty. — None of us informed Jasper that behind his back we were still performing our jobs with great care and precision.
Conduit Bending Basics
The more I thought about the idea of “Farm Fixing” and “Risk Management” and how it was being applied at our plant, after about a year, I wrote a letter to the Superintendent over all the Power Plants, Jack Coffman.
Here is the letter I wrote (It was titled “Farm Fixing and Risk Management” — appropriate, don’t you think?):
Dear Jack Coffman,
I went through the Root Learning Class on Friday, September 6. After the class our table remained to discuss with Bruce Scambler the situation that exists at the power plants concerning the way we maintain our equipment. We attempted to discuss our concerns with our facilitator, however, the canyon depicted in the first visual became more and more evident the further we discussed it.
The Canyon Root Learning Map
My two concerns are the terms “Farm Fixing” and “Risk Management”. These are two good processes which I believe must be employed if we are to compete in an open market. I do believe, however, that our management has misunderstood their true meaning and has turned them into catch phrases that are something totally different than they were originally intended.
I come from a family of farmers. My father and grandfather were farmers. I was concerned about our use of the term “Farm-fixed”, so I discussed the way we were using it in our company with my father and I have confirmed my understanding of the term.
My grandfather as a farmer was a Welder, a Blacksmith, a Carpenter, and an Engine Mechanic. When a piece of machinery broke down while he was out harvesting or ploughing a field, it is true that baling wire and a quick fix was needed to continue the work for the day. There is a small window of opportunity when harvesting and the equipment had to be running during this time or the farmer’s livelihood was at stake.
That evening, however, the piece that broke was reworked and re-machined until it was better than the original store bought item. Thus guaranteeing that it wouldn’t break down the following day. If the repairs took all night to make it right, they would stay up all night repairing it correctly. It was vital to their livelihood to have their machinery running as well as possible.
A Ford Tractor soon became my grandfather’s tractor as the original factory parts were replaced with more sturdy parts. It wasn’t repainted (gold-plated), because they weren’t planning on selling their equipment. The tractors and plows would last years longer than originally designed. All this was before farming became a subsidized industry.
We need to “Farm-Fix” our equipment. Our management however, focuses on the use of baling wire during an emergency and replaces the true meaning of Farm-Fixing with the meaning of “Jerry-Rigging”. Which is merely a temporary fix while farming and is NOT farm-fixing something. We have been maintaining our plant with quick fixes and have not been farm-fixing them. If so, our equipment would be more reliable, and would last longer than originally intended.
Risk Management is another area that has been misunderstood by our management. They have gone to school and have been trained in Risk Management. I don’t believe they are using their tools in the way that they were taught. They have taken the underlying idea that we may not need to make a change or repair a certain piece of equipment at this particular time and have made it the center of their idea of Risk Management. Risk Management is more than that. It is weighing the consequences of both actions against the cost and making an informed decision to determine the timing of maintenance.
Risk Management at our plant has become nothing more than speculation, or what I call “Wish Management”. The decision is often made based on the immediate cost and downtime to delay maintenance without properly identifying the possible damage that could occur and the cost of that scenario.
The phrase “It’s run that way this long, it will probably be all right” is used to justify not repairing the equipment. No real analysis is done. Then we cross our fingers and “Wish” that it will continue running forever.
I believe in the concepts of Risk Management and Farm-fixing. I think they are processes that should be used in our company to achieve and maintain “Best-In-Class”. I am concerned, however, that if we continue on the course that we are on where “Wishing” and “Jerry-rigging” are our processes, it will only be a matter of time before our workers get killed and our plants melt down around us.
Kevin Breazile
Sooner Station
— End of the letter. See? I was always trying to stir things up.
The first summer I worked at the Power Plant as a summer help, we had a couple of floor drain covers in the maintenance shop that were missing from the floor drains. Plywood had been used to cover the drains, which had been smashed down by the heavy equipment that traveled in and out of the shop. One day during lunch I wrote a Maintenance Order to have the floor drain covers replaced and placed it on Marlin McDaniel’s (the only A Foreman at the time) desk. I was only an 18 year old kid that was just learning my way around in the world and already stirring things up, but I figured this was an accident waiting to happen.
The very next day, a plant mechanic, Tom Dean stepped onto one of those floor drains while carrying a heavy ladder and seriously hurt his back. It was a life changing event for Tom that immediately changed his career. The next day, the drains had new covers. I talked about this in the post: “Power Plant Safety is Job Number One”
Approximately one year after I wrote the Farm-fixing and Risk Management letter to Jack Coffman, we had a major incident at the power plant that was directly caused by the decision not to replace a coupling when it was known to be faulty (risk management, they called it). It would have required extending an overhaul a day or two. Instead, after half of the T-G floor burned to the ground and the plant was offline for about 3 months. Millions of dollars of damage. That is a story for another post.
Power Plant “We’ve Got the Power” Program
Originally posted March 14, 2014:
Early January, 1990 the entire maintenance shop at the coal-fired power plant in North Central Oklahoma was called to the break room which doubled as our main conference room in order to attend an important meeting. We watched as a new program was explained to us. It was a program called “We’ve Got the Power”. It centered around the idea that the best people who knew how to improve the operation of the plant were the people that worked there every day… The employees. When it was over, we were all given an Igloo Lunch box just for attending the meeting. We were also promised a lot more prizes in the future for participating in the program.
“We’ve Got the Power” Igloo Lunch Box
In order to participate further, we needed to sign up on a team. Preferably the team would be cross-functional, because, as they explained, a cross-functional team usually could come up with the most creative ideas for improving things at the plant. Once we signed up for the team each member on the team was given a gray windbreaker.
A windbreaker like this, only gray. The “We’ve Got the Power” logo was in the same place as this logo
I don’t have an actual picture of the windbreaker I was given. I wore it to work for a number of months until we found out that the material was highly flammable and that it was not safe for us to wear it on the job. We were supposed to wear only flame retardant clothing. I kept the jacket for 15 years, but the jacket was made with material that disintegrated over time, and one day when I pulled it out of the closet to wear, I found that it was literally falling apart on the hanger. I had no choice but to throw it away.
There were some interesting reactions to this program. I thought the program was a great idea and couldn’t wait until it began in order to submit our ideas for improving the plant. Others decided for some reason that they didn’t want to have any part in the program. Most of the Power Plant Men were eager to take part.
So, here’s how it worked. We had about 5 weeks to prepare our first ideas to submit to steering committee, which consisted of our plant manager Ron Kilman, the assistant plant manager Ben Brandt and I believe the Engineering Supervisor Jim Arnold. I don’t remember for sure if Jim Arnold was on the steering committee. We could only submit three ideas. At any given time, we could only have three ideas in the pipeline. Once a decision had been made about that idea, then we could submit another one.
I was the leader of the team that we assembled. It consisted of the following electricians besides myself: Scott Hubbard, Charles Foster and Terry Blevins. One mechanic Jody Morse. We also had two people from the warehouse on our team: Dick Dale and Darlene Mitchell. Here are their pictures:
Terry Blevins
Charles Foster
Scott Hubbard
Jody Morse
Darlene Mitchell
Richard Dale many years later
I was somehow the luckiest guy in the plant to have some of the best brain power on my team. I will go into some of our ideas in a later post. Actually, I think I will have to have at least two more posts to completely cover this topic. For now, I just want to explain how this program worked and maybe share a thing or two about our team.
If one of the ideas we submitted was approved to be implemented, then we would receive an number of award points that was consistent with the amount of money the idea would save the company in one year. If it wasn’t a money saving idea or you couldn’t figure out how to calculate the savings, then there was a set amount of points that would be granted to the team. Each team member would receive the same number of points as everyone else on the team. Each person would receive the full savings of the idea.
We were given a catalog from a company called Maritz Inc. This is a company that specializes in employee motivation. They have been around a long time, and the gifts in the catalog ranged from small items such as a toaster, all the way up to pretty large pieces of furniture and other big items. I challenge the Power Plant Men who read this blog that were heavily involved in this program to leave a comment with the types of prizes they picked from this catalog.
The rules for the program were very specific, and there was a healthy (and in some cases, not so healthy) competition that ensued during the event. Once we were able to submit our ideas, we had 13 weeks to turn in all of our ideas. Keeping in mind that you could only have 3 ideas in the pipeline at a time. (well… they bent that rule at the last minute. — I’m sure Ron Kilman was thrilled about that).
I mentioned Ron Kilman, because for the entire 13 weeks and probably beyond, Ron (our plant manager)was sort of sequestered in his office reviewing the hundreds of ideas that were being turned in. At first some mistakes were made, and then there were attempts to correct those, and you can imagine that it was sort of organized (or disorganized) chaos for a while.
I will go into our ideas in a later post, but I will say that despite the fact that a good deal of our points were incorrectly allocated to other teams, we still came out in second place at our plant, and in sixth place in the company. Only the top 5 teams were able to go to Hawaii, and we were only a few points behind the fifth place team. So, all in all, I think our team was happy with our progress. Especially since we knew that over 200,000 of our points, were mistakenly given away and never corrected. Which would have made us close to 2nd place. Our team had no hard feelings when it was over. We felt that for the effort that we put into it, we were well rewarded.
In the middle of this program, my daughter was born and so a lot of my points went to purchasing things like a play pen, a baby swing, and a large assortment of baby toys. I had been such a miser in my marriage up to this point so that the majority of the furniture in our house had been purchased in Ponca City garage sales early on Saturday mornings. I had the idea that for the first few years of our marriage, we would live real cheap, and then work our way up gradually. That way, we would always feel like we were moving up in the world. The first house that we rented in Ponca City was a little dumpy old house for $250 per month.
I had been married for 4 years by the time this program rolled around, and when the first few boxes of prizes had just arrived at our house, one Sunday in April, a priest came to the house we were renting on Sixth Street in Stillwater, Oklahoma to bless the house. When he walked in and saw a large box leaning against the wall in the living room, and not a stitch of furniture, he asked us if we were moving. I asked him what he meant. He said, “Well, you don’t have any furniture.” I said, “Oh. No. We’re not moving. We just have the furniture in the other room” (which was a spare bedroom that we used as the computer room. That was where our old couch was along with an old coffee table (both of which had been given to me by my friend Tim Flowers).
From this program I was able to furnish my entire living room. I had a nice sofa (with a fold out bed), a new coffee table with two matching end tables. All of them good quality. Through the years, we have replaced the sofa and the coffee table. I also had two Lazy Boys, which I still own, but we keep in the game room:
Two Lazy-Boys received as an award from the “We’ve Got the Power” program
The biggest prize I purchased from this program was a real nice Thomasville Dining room table and chairs:
Dining Room Table received as an award from the “We’ve Got The Power” program
Two of the chairs are missing because they are across the street in my parents house (on loan).
So, you see, you could get some really nice prizes from this program. The furniture came along just at the time my family was beginning to grow.
When we were originally forming our team Ron Kilman’s secretary, Linda Shiever had joined our team. We had signed her up and had even held our first meeting. Then one day she came to me and told me that she was going to be a part of the steering committee. She was pretty excited about this because she figured that the steering committee, with all their hard work would be well off when it came to prizes. So, we wished her well.
Linda Shiever
During the program it turned out that the team that had the most work to do was the steering committee. They worked day and night on this program. They basically gave up their day job to focus solely on this program for those 13 weeks. As it turned out, they were the least compensated as far as awards went. So, it was turning out that Linda had left our team, which was raking in the points, to go to a team that was barely receiving any points.
When the time came to implement the projects that were selected, the foreman that was over the team that was going to implement an idea would receive a percentage of the award points for doing the implementation. I remember my foreman Andy Tubbs (who was on the winning team at our plant), coming to us and telling us that we were to go implement some ideas and that he was going to be receiving award points while we went to actually do the work. — It was just one of those interesting rules in this program.
Andy Tubbs, being the true Power Plant Man that he was, said this didn’t set too well with him. So, what he decided to do was spend the points that he was awarded for implementing ideas on prizes for the employees to use in the electric shop. I remember that he had purchased various different items that came in handy for us in the shop. I don’t remember off-hand what they were. If one of the electricians would leave a comment below to remind me… that would be great.
So. I was bothered by the idea that Linda Shiever had been coaxed onto her team with visions of grandeur, only to find out (like Ron found out), that all their hard work was not going to be compensated at a reasonable level. I never blamed Ron Kilman for this, because it made sense that Linda should be on that team anyway, since she spent her day in Ron’s office and he did need someone to help with the enormous amount of paperwork. So, I decided to help her out.
Two of our biggest ideas had been approved to save the company over $315,000 each per year (when we tracked it the following year, it ended up with a savings of $345,000). In order to implement the idea, I believe the implementer would receive either a half or a third of the points. So, I thought of a way to have Linda Shiever be the implementer of the idea.
I remember explaining to Ron Kilman that in order to implement this idea, since it mainly consisted of a process change to how the precipitator is powered up during start-up, we just needed someone that could type up the procedures so that we could place them in our precipitator manuals. I suggested that Linda Shiever would be the best person to type up the procedure. And that is what happened. She received the award points for implementing our biggest idea.
When it was all said and done, the company was able to quickly save a lot of money, and in some cases increase revenue. I think the biggest idea at our plant from the winning team came from Larry Kuennen who figured out a way to change the way the boiler was fired that greatly increased the efficiency. This one idea probably made the entire program worth the effort that everyone went through.
It’s amazing what happens when you add a little extra motivation. Great things can happen.
Comments from the Orignal Post:
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If I remember correctly, Jasper Christensen was the 3rd member of Sooner’s IAC (Idea Action Committee). I think Jim Arnold got to go to Hawaii with his team. This was the most intense, long-term, difficult (personally and inter-company relationships) program of my entire working career. Whoever decided it was fair competition for the Power Plants to compete with the other corporate departments (like the Regions, Accounting, Customer Service, Human Resources, etc.) with cost reduction as the measurement, really blew it. Power Production is where the largest potential existed for cost reduction by at least an order of magnitude. The Plant Managers took a lot of grief from the other Managers (“rigged”, “not fair”, “you guys cooked the books”, “there’s no way”, etc.).
Sooner Plant won the over-all competition with the highest idea approval rate of any company location (19 total locations). We had audited net savings of $2.1 million/year. Reduction in “Station Power” alone accounted for a revenue increase of $7 million during 1993. We (the IAC) worked many nights, weekends, and took work home. I was proud of the way Sooner teams really got after it. It was a huge success for OG&E.
The rewards I remember getting were a tread mill, a small sharpening wheel, and a CD player. My jacket fell apart too.
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Thanks Ron. I clearly remember how much time your team had to put into this effort. It was hardest on your team because you didn’t have a choice where the rest of us did.
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That’s too bad about the 200,000 points…but it sounds like you were very good about that, considering. Nice job getting that sweet furniture. It IS AMAZING what can be done with some teamwork and incentive to make an idea work. So glad to see you all did so well.
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FINALLY—An incentive program offering something more substantial than free pizza! 🙂Despite the mix-up in points, you worked for a decent company!!!! 🙂
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I remember Dad getting a sleeper sofa, and we all got some nice binoculars and a lot of other items it seems. I don’t know what all Andy got for the electrical shop but I know one was an electric knife that is still there with the logo on it I believe.
Power Plant Farm Fixing and Risk Management
We were told at the coal-fired Power Plant in North Central Oklahoma that we were going to have to stop doing the excellent job we were used to doing. We no longer had time to make everything perfect. We just had to patch things together enough so that it was fixed and leave it at that. Jasper Christensen told us that we were going to have to “Farm Fix” things and work harder because we now only had half the employees.
Jasper Christensen
Two things bothered me right away….
First, “Work Harder.” What exactly does that mean? How does one work harder? When I pick up my tool bucket to go work on a job, should I put some extra bricks in it so that it is harder to carry? What then? Think about it… Shouldn’t we be working “Smarter” instead of “Harder”? We were all hard workers (if that means, spending a good 8 hour day doing your job). Any slackers were laid off 7 years earlier.
When I heard “Farm Fixing” I took offense to the reference. Jasper had mentioned using bailing wire to hold something up instead of taking the time to make our jobs look pretty. As if bailing wire was somehow synonymous with “Farm Fixing”. My grandfather was a farmer…. I’ll talk about that in a bit….
Jasper also informed us that we were no longer stuck doing only our own trade. So, an electrician should expect to help out as a mechanic or a welder as long as it wasn’t too involved. Certain welding jobs, for instance, require a certified welder. If the job was just to tack weld up a bracket somewhere, then I, as an electrician, could wheel a welding machine over there and weld it up.
After that initial meeting after we had been downsized to pint-sized, we met with our own teams. Alan Kramer was my new foreman. He encouraged us to learn the different skills from our teammates.
Alan Kramer
I asked Ed Shiever to teach me how to weld. After about an hour, I decided I wasn’t too interested in melting metal using electricity. I would leave it to the experts. I was left with a sunburned chest, as I usually wore a V-Neck Tee Shirt in the summer.
Ed Shiever Welder Extraordinaire
Jody Morse was a mechanic on our team, who had been a friend of mine since I was a janitor. We had been on the labor crew together. He asked me if he could do some electrical work with me. He thought it would be a useful skill to learn. I happily agreed to let him work alongside me running conduit and pulling wire around the precipitator hoppers.
Jody Morse
It wouldn’t include working on any circuits where he might accidentally come into contact with anything live. So, I thought this was a good starting point. That was one of the first skills I learned as an electrician-in-training when I was taught by Gene Roget, a master of conduit bending.
I showed Jody how to bend the conduit and have it end up being the right length with the curves in the right place (which is a little tricky at first). Then I showed Jody where the conduit needed to go, and where the wire needed to end up. He said he wanted to do this all by himself, so I left him to it and left to do something else.
A little while later, Jody came back and said he had a slight problem. He had cut the cable just a little bit too short (Yeah. I had done that myself, see the post: “When Enough Power Plant Stuff Just Ain’t Enough“). I looked at the problem with him, and he was about six inches too short.
Jody looked the job over and decided he had two options. Pull some new longer cable, or try to make the existing cable work.He figured out that if he cut off 6 inches of the conduit, and sort of bent it out so that it was no longer exactly at 90 degrees, then it would still reach where it needed to go, only the conduit wouldn’t look so pretty because the conduit would appear a little cockeyed. We figured this would be all right because Jasper had just finished telling us that we needed to make things not so pretty anymore. Jody finished the job, and filled out the Maintenance Order indicating that the job was done.
The cable and conduit job had been requested by Ron Madron, one of the Instrument and Controls guys on our team. When he went out and looked at the conduit, let’s just say that he wasn’t too impressed. He went to Alan Kramer and complained that the conduit job was disgraceful. I don’t remember his exact words, but when I heard about it, it sounded to me like he said “It was an abomination to all things electrical”.
I had always taken pride in my work, and doing a “sloppy” job was not normal for me. I didn’t want Jody to feel bad about this because he was pretty proud of having completed the job all by himself without my help. So I went and had a one-on-one with Ron and explained the situation to him. I also told him that the next time he has problem with something I did, come directly and talk to me about it instead of our foreman. We’re all on the same team now.
I think once he realized the situation, he was more receptive. Jody and I did go back out there and fix the issue by running a new cable that was long enough, with a new piece of conduit that was installed with the best of care so that it looked pretty. — None of us informed Jasper that behind his back we were still performing our jobs with great care and precision.
Conduit Bending Basics
The more I thought about the idea of “Farm Fixing” and “Risk Management” and how it was being applied at our plant, after about a year, I wrote a letter to the Superintendent over all the Power Plants, Jack Coffman.
Here is the letter I wrote (It was titled “Farm Fixing and Risk Management” — appropriate, don’t you think?):
Dear Jack Coffman,
I went through the Root Learning Class on Friday, September 6. After the class our table remained to discuss with Bruce Scambler the situation that exists at the power plants concerning the way we maintain our equipment. We attempted to discuss our concerns with our facilitator, however, the canyon depicted in the first visual became more and more evident the further we discussed it.
My two concerns are the terms “Farm Fixing” and “Risk Management”. These are two good processes which I believe must be employed if we are to compete in an open market. I do believe, however, that our management has misunderstood their true meaning and has turned them into catch phrases that are something totally different than they were originally intended.
I come from a family of farmers. My father and grandfather were farmers. I was concerned about our use of the term “Farm-fixed”, so I discussed the way we were using it in our company with my father and I have confirmed my understanding of the term.
My grandfather as a farmer was a Welder, a Blacksmith, a Carpenter, and an Engine Mechanic. When a piece of machinery broke down while he was out harvesting or ploughing a field, it is true that baling wire and a quick fix was needed to continue the work for the day. There is a small window of opportunity when harvesting and the equipment had to be running during this time or the farmer’s livelihood was at stake.
That evening, however, the piece that broke was reworked and re-machined until it was better than the original store bought item. Thus guaranteeing that it wouldn’t break down the following day. If the repairs took all night to make it right, they would stay up all night repairing it correctly. It was vital to their livelihood to have their machinery running as well as possible.
A Ford Tractor soon became my grandfather’s tractor as the original factory parts were replaced with more sturdy parts. It wasn’t repainted (gold-plated), because they weren’t planning on selling their equipment. The tractors and plows would last years longer than originally designed. All this was before farming became a subsidized industry.
We need to “Farm-Fix” our equipment. Our management however, focuses on the use of baling wire during an emergency and replaces the true meaning of Farm-Fixing with the meaning of “Jerry-Rigging”. Which is merely a temporary fix while farming and is NOT farm-fixing something. We have been maintaining our plant with quick fixes and have not been farm-fixing them. If so, our equipment would be more reliable, and would last longer than originally intended.
Risk Management is another area that has been misunderstood by our management. They have gone to school and have been trained in Risk Management. I don’t believe they are using their tools in the way that they were taught. They have taken the underlying idea that we may not need to make a change or repair a certain piece of equipment at this particular time and have made it the center of their idea of Risk Management. Risk Management is more than that. It is weighing the consequences of both actions against the cost and making an informed decision to determine the timing of maintenance.
Risk Management at our plant has become nothing more than speculation, or what I call “Wish Management”. The decision is often made based on the immediate cost and downtime to delay maintenance without properly identifying the possible damage that could occur and the cost of that scenario.
The phrase “It’s run that way this long, it will probably be all right” is used to justify not repairing the equipment. No real analysis is done. Then we cross our fingers and “Wish” that it will continue running forever.
I believe in the concepts of Risk Management and Farm-fixing. I think they are processes that should be used in our company to achieve and maintain “Best-In-Class”. I am concerned, however, that if we continue on the course that we are on where “Wishing” and “Jerry-rigging” are our processes, it will only be a matter of time before our workers get killed and our plants melt down around us.
Kevin Breazile
Sooner Station
— End of the letter. See? I was always trying to stir things up.
The first summer I worked at the Power Plant as a summer help, we had a couple of floor drain covers in the maintenance shop that were missing from the floor drains. Plywood had been used to cover the drains, which had been smashed down by the heavy equipment that traveled in and out of the shop. One day during lunch I wrote a Maintenance Order to have the floor drain covers replaced and placed it on Marlin McDaniel’s (the only A Foreman at the time) desk. I was only an 18 year old kid that was just learning my way around in the world and already stirring things up, but I figured this was an accident waiting to happen.
The very next day, a plant mechanic, Tom Dean stepped onto one of those floor drains while carrying a heavy ladder and seriously hurt his back. It was a life changing event for Tom that immediately changed his career. The next day, the drains had new covers. I talked about this in the post: “Power Plant Safety is Job Number One”
Approximately one year after I wrote the Farm-fixing and Risk Management letter to Jack Coffman, we had a major incident at the power plant that was directly caused by the decision not to replace a coupling when it was known to be faulty (risk management, they called it). It would have required extending an overhaul a day or two. Instead, after half of the T-G floor burned to the ground and the plant was offline for about 3 months. Millions of dollars of damage. That is a story for another post.
Power Plant Men 
If I remember correctly, Jasper Christensen was the 3rd member of Sooner’s IAC (Idea Action Committee). I think Jim Arnold got to go to Hawaii with his team. This was the most intense, long-term, difficult (personally and inter-company relationships) program of my entire working career. Whoever decided it was fair competition for the Power Plants to compete with the other corporate departments (like the Regions, Accounting, Customer Service, Human Resources, etc.) with cost reduction as the measurement, really blew it. Power Production is where the largest potential existed for cost reduction by at least an order of magnitude. The Plant Managers took a lot of grief from the other Managers (“rigged”, “not fair”, “you guys cooked the books”, “there’s no way”, etc.).
Sooner Plant won the over-all competition with the highest idea approval rate of any company location (19 total locations). We had audited net savings of $2.1 million/year. Reduction in “Station Power” alone accounted for a revenue increase of $7 million during 1993. We (the IAC) worked many nights, weekends, and took work home. I was proud of the way Sooner teams really got after it. It was a huge success for OG&E.
The rewards I remember getting were a tread mill, a small sharpening wheel, and a CD player. My jacket fell apart too.
Thanks Ron. I clearly remember how much time your team had to put into this effort. It was hardest on your team because you didn’t have a choice where the rest of us did.
That’s too bad about the 200,000 points…but it sounds like you were very good about that, considering. Nice job getting that sweet furniture. It IS AMAZING what can be done with some teamwork and incentive to make an idea work. So glad to see you all did so well.
FINALLY—An incentive program offering something more substantial than free pizza! 🙂Despite the mix-up in points, you worked for a decent company!!!! 🙂
I remember Dad getting a sleeper sofa, and we all got some nice binoculars and a lot of other items it seems. I don’t know what all Andy got for the electrical shop but I know one was an electric knife that is still there with the logo on it I believe.