MRO Today - Showa Denko Carbon: Team focus

Team focus at Showa Denko:
This isn't another 'flavor of the month'

by Clair D. Urbain

When management calls a meeting of front-line maintenance and production people and introduces a new process that’s supposed to help cut costs and improve productivity, you’re bound to see eyes roll and arms cross in the meeting room.

“That was my perception when we had our first equipment health team meeting. All I could think about was, ‘Here we go again!’” says Joey Westbury, operations facilitator for Showa Denko Carbon's plant in Ridgeville, S.C. “At first, this looked like a project that would die in six months.”

But curiously, the flavor of the month has turned out to have a much longer-lasting taste, and it’s making in-roads in the plant. The key, says Brad Peterson, of Strategic Asset Management Inc., the outside consultant who helped Showa Denko Carbon develop its program, was top management commitment and team member training and buy-in.

The training covered how teams work, how to conduct effective meetings, generic problem-solving exercises to hone these skills and time and focus to write a team charter, which is the team’s reason for being.

“Two team members also attended a two-day root cause failure analysis training course because they had never been trained in that skill,” Peterson adds.

“This training was helpful,” says Randy Goethe, maintenance technician. “We were close- minded on root-cause failure analysis. About halfway through the training, it was like a light bulb going on. It really helped me understand how to look for the true cause of a failure, not just fix the symptom.”

The team was assigned one task that in reality was two, says Mike Jones, area project engineer. “Management charged us with the job of improving equipment reliability in the plant, and that entailed building a structure in which to do it. That was their only mandate. We had to figure out the rest,” he says.

Equipment Health Team No. 1 took longer to complete the gulper analysis because it had to develop the methods by which other teams would complete their analyses. That’s good, says Peterson.

“It helps them go through the discovery process to understand what it takes to change the culture for reliability," he says. " They were the process design team as well as the first equipment health team. They had to see some success before it would be clear to them that the process actually worked.”

Team members commented that being on an equipment health team was added responsibility on top of already full plates. It would have been better to have some full-time work on these projects so results would occur even faster.

While it would be great to see a faster return on time, Peterson cautions that full-time people on the projects can’t be as effective.

“First, no organization has funds for that added cost of people, and second, this process should be part of everyone’s job," he says. " Making things better shouldn’t be a separate job. It’s a fundamental of quality theory.”

(For more information on Showa Denko Carbon, view "Breaking the bottleneck.")

This article appeared in the April/May 1998 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright, 1998.