01926 633333
Eliminating Root Causes for Forced Outages
The Problem
Centrica was experiencing production losses and higher than expected forced outages from one of their new Power stations. There were risks that the team was jumping to solutions (which were all expensive options) without any real evidence that the root cause would be eliminated.
Centrica retained Bourton Group to build the internal teams capability in complex problem solving and supporting them through the life of the project.
The Solution
We trained the production loss work-stream team in Lean sigma tools and techniques focusing on root cause analysis. The team then went on to:
- Examine historical outage data to identify trends and areas of significant concern
- Established work-teams to understand and remove root causes, including
common issues which affect performance
Over a period of six months the team established a significant system design fault and recommended a solution that would eliminate the main cause of the outages
The Benefits
Benefits are estimated at £4M PA through a mixture of reduced depreciation, reduced maintenance and increased revenue.
The team was also able to feed back to the manufacturers a design fault to prevent others suffering from the same problem.
What Centrica Energy said about us
The improvement team are still meeting every couple of weeks and the process is improving all the time.
Rob Wallace, Operational Excellence Manager