Utilizing Policy and Procedures with Scott Kelley
In this episode, the guest Scott Kelley explains another cell in the hexagon of Plant Hexcellence model and that is, Policies and Procedures. This cell is pretty much based on standards and the directions to follow these standards but before you get into the details, it is extremely important that you understand the basic terminology. A policy is comprised of the written guidelines that are officially part of any organization where the employees are bound to respect and follow these documented and published, set of rules. The procedure is a technique or method that you use to support and repeatedly implement these guidelines in that particular organization. Then these terms are tied back to the processes as they include the step by step graphical interpretation of the methods that you are going to adapt—answering what’s and how’s to achieve the guidelines. Another term that is often confused with the policy is the practice that is different—unless organization wants to make it officially part of the policy—as it’s not documented like policies. Now as all of these terms as dependent on each other because written guidelines are always easy to keep in mind and follow one way or another. The procedures are documented to make them easier to follow or at least the standard and basic procedures are to be strictly adapted in every good organization.
This cell is comprised of safety standards, daily reporting, and then ISO standards which must be followed if you want to meet the requirements for the safety, environmental, and profitability goals.
There are a lot of good practices that are not part of policies such as best methods such as proactive maintenance or 5Y for Root Cause and Failure Analysis can be made part of the policy to ad-hear all the necessary objectives that will save time, money, and lives. The main focus should be to support the people by permitting them to take actions that will yield optimum results. After this, you will need to set trigger points for standard procedures covering different levels of criticality meeting the reliability standards as well. The events will allow you to interpret how can you proceed further as in the case of a near miss? You will need to know the reasons of the near miss, losses in time or revenues, the cost of repair, and other issues involving safety and environmental hazards. All of these will affect the net profit of your product, the performance of your equipment, plants, and other assets.
To have good policies and procedures allow you to achieve best industry practices consistently with much better development in long-term policy measures. It also helps you to define your asset hierarchy, manage change, and design new processes as you improve these things with time. The only way to ensure the successful execution is to regularly manage the documentation so that your organizational assets can be better. Avoid too many policies and provide details of procedures based on the nature of activities.
Eruditio Links:
- Eruditio, LLC
- A Smarter Way of Preventative Maintenance – Free eBook
- Maintenance Planning & Scheduling: Planning for Profitability Video Course
- Plant Hexcellence Article on Policy & Procedures
Geometric Reliability Links:
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