Phillips 66 - A Burning Platform for Change

Mike Woolbert illustrates his company's commitment to TPM implementation with the following story:

A man working on an oil platform in the North Sea was awakened suddenly one night by an explosion. Amidst the chaos, he made his way to the edge of the platform. As a plume of fire billowed behind him, he decided to jump from the burning platform even though he had been trained to never consider this as an option for the following reasons: It's a 150-foot drop from the platform to the water, and there are often debris and burning oil on the surface; and if the jump into the 40° F water doesn't kill you, you will die of exposure within 15 minutes. Luckily, the man survived the jump and was hauled aboard a rescue boat shortly thereafter. When asked why he jumped, he replied, "Better probable death than certain death."

Sweeny produces 4 billion pounds of ethylene per year, 100,000 barrels per day of natural gas liquids and 215,000 barrels per day of crude oil. "Profit margins are really bad for refineries right now," says Woolbert. "Prior to starting TPM, our operating cost per barrel was considered to be at world-class standards, and we were still having a hard time making money. So the business was struggling --that was our burning platform. It's risky to implement TPM because if you don't do it correctly, you have a lot to lose. But we knew that if we didn't take that risk, it meant certain death."

To minimize the risk of implementing TPM, Phillips 66 approaches TPM as a management process, not just an improvement program. "TPM is not a program and it's not just autonomous maintenance," stresses Woolbert. "All of the TPM pillars (see Figure 1) are important. They feed one another. They overlap in different ways to form one contiguous process in which activities are linked to business goals."

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March 1997 Quality Digest