Cumulative Impact Success Reported at Comanche Peak

DevonWay’s continuous improvement platform helps enterprises continue to tune core processes that deliver performance improvement and respond to regulatory change. By simplifying business processes to reduce adverse cumulative impacts of regulation, DevonWay’s Continuous Improvement solutions create a turnkey method to help its customers reduce costs, re-allocate employees from low-value to- high-value tasks, and improve the effectiveness of supervisors and managers.

One example brought our way is from Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant. Luminant’s leadership always encourages team members to report all problems and unusual circumstances, regardless of perceived severity, as a practice for ensuring nuclear safety. The plant’s corrective action program uses ActionWay to make condition reporting easy by staff throughout all departments. Data capture from smart phones and mobile pads has added to this healthy flow of information from an engaged workforce producing submission volumes that are often high.

In response to high volume and ever growing demands for time, Industry Cumulative Impacts guidance recommends plant leaders clearly separate urgent conditions from less-urgent administrative tasks so team members can focus their energies where the need is greatest. ActionWay supports this recommendation, giving plant leadership the ability to highlight urgent conditions and giving team members clear visibility to plant priorities.

When Comanche Peak leaders review ActionWay submissions they bucket them as either ‘Condition Reports’ or ‘Administrative Process Actions’. Team members know ‘Condition Reports’ always take priority and their timeliness is essential, while due dates for ‘Administrative Actions’ may be freely extended.

To enhance clarity, Comanche Peak color codes ActionWay assignments by priority and separates them by priority in all reports and notifications. Below are examples.

Because topics of all priority live in ActionWay, team members never need to wonder where to report a problem or how to process an assignment, and leaders can seamlessly change the priority of a topic when new information emerges. ActionWay delivers the clarity described in Industry Cumulative Impacts guidance and the flexibility plants need to adjust their processes when better ways or new guidance comes forward.

Larry Lucas, Senior Evaluator, PI&L, Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, will be presenting “Cumulative Impact Project – Conduct of Performance Improvement (INPO 14-004)” during a plenary session in San Diego, at the 7th Continuous Improvement Conference Feb. 9-12th 2015. Throughout the conference many companies will be benchmarking their approach and reporting time and motion savings from fewer clicks to changing the way work is being accomplished during pre-job briefs, corrective action programs and human performance.

Join the discussion on Cumulative Impacts at Ci7. Contact the CI Conference team for more information: conference@devonway.com