Dale Bucy
Reliability-Based Maintenance technician, 
Texas Instruments

Jim Westerheid had a plan to streamline/modernize/implode (pick one) the maintenance and machine reliability practices at Texas Instruments’ 19 million-square-foot facility in Dallas.

All this maintenance manager needed was a test pilot/superman/guinea pig (again, pick one).

Dale Bucy, please report to the maintenance office.

“I got called in Feb. 15, 2002. I won’t forget that day,” says Bucy, a technician responsible for motor circuit, vibration and oil analyses.

Westerheid sat with Bucy and chronicled the department’s inefficiencies and areas for growth:

Expensive production systems were taken down multiple times in a span of months — for example, once for pump work, a second time for electrical work, a third for chiller preventive maintenance.

Communication with operations personnel was sometimes poor, creating cases where operations didn’t shut down equipment for preventive or predictive work.

“It was a free-for-all,” says Bucy. “It had been that way for so many years, it was accepted practice. No one could change it.”

Westerheid thought different. He had a man and a plan in mind.

His plan centered around improved planning and teamwork. The critical element was the creation of integrated maintenance teams that would work with operations and suppliers and execute a highly detailed master schedule for planned equipment shutdowns, codenamed TARs (for turnarounds). TARs would increase reliability and availability of specified equipment and reduce overall costs.

Each cross-functional, 15-or-so-member team would have one leader to manage the day-to-day operations and coordinate activities.

Westerheid told Bucy the first team would address the plant’s most important equipment — the chilled water system.

“High heat load is part of the production process for making microelectronics. You can’t make wafers, you can’t make chips, if you can’t control the environment,” says Westerheid. “Making that the first project, there was much at stake and a big opportunity for failure.”

Bucy was informed he would be on the team and serve as its leader.

“My first response was, ‘You have got to be kidding. I’m going to be responsible for 46,000 tons of chillers?’” he says.

Bucy didn’t make our 2002 All-Pro Team and earn Pro of the Year honors for backing down from the enormous challenge.

Instead, he captained an integration team that shook up the plant, registered $500,000 in cost savings in 2002 and changed the way that maintenance does business.

“Dale had to be the leader for this team,” says mechanical maintenance engineer Matt French. “He had the technical knowledge that was necessary in a person driving this team. He knew more about chillers than practically anyone else.”

Bucy’s experience came from overseeing a small chiller operation at a different TI plant in the 1990s.

He also had a reputation for thinking outside the box and questioning standard operating procedures.

Bucy worked 80- to 90-hour weeks for the first few months, examining all the components and ancillary components of 23 targeted chillers. He then worked with operations coordinator Paula Munter and others to diagram a schedule where all of the components for an individual chiller would be serviced at one time, instead of multiple shutdowns scattered at inopportune moments. A TAR may include maintenance work (like-for-like replacements, repairs, inspections, cleaning, catalyst changeouts, etc.) and capital work (upgrades, add-ons and tie-ins to capital projects).

With a schedule set for the entire chiller system, it was Bucy’s job to make sure the plan was executed. 

The project’s big challenge was winning over co-workers and getting them in line for this initiative.

“I had lots of responsibility and no real authority,” he says. “No one reported to me. I didn’t have the power to tell anybody what to do. Along the way, I felt like I was stepping on everybody’s toes.”

Some maintenance and operations workers feared the initiative and held on tightly to the past. “You’re talking about changing 35 to 40 years of ‘this is how we’ve always done it,’” he says.

Some engineers questioned his credentials during early project meetings. “They didn’t know who I was and, all of a sudden, I’m in there making decisions on how we do these functional duties. A chilled water engineer did most of that stuff for a number of years,” he says.

Some maintenance co-workers questioned his blue-collar loyalty. “They thought I was trying to move up the corporate ladder,” he says.

Bucy answered the questions and calmed the fears, speaking to each group on their particular level.

“Dale spent a lot of one-on-one time. When people had concerns, he addressed them all,” says Munter.

Says Bucy: “I got them to understand that this is for the better, this will make their life easier. And, it did. It took a ton of effort off them.”

With everyone pulling in the same direction, reliability, uptime, productivity and cooperation rose.

TI has spun off four additional integrated teams that will help cut maintenance costs 12 percent in 2003 and 7 percent in 2004.

“People that followed Dale had it easier,” says Westerheid. “The model is in place now. Dale blazed the trail  and demonstrated to all how this was going to work.”

This article appeared in the December 2002/January 2003 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright, 2003.

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