Evolve or lose: achieving a performance culture

President and Founder of SAMI, Brad Peterson, explains SAMI's revolutionary Ascend™ Program for improving processes and efficiencies while coaching behavioural change, and how this leads to the development of a Performance Culture within your organization. New behaviors create a new and effective Performance Culture.

“The business can't change, people change. SAMI focuses on people to make sure that they change towards really buying into these business processes. That was quite unique for me”
-Lionel Prinsloo, Departmental Manager, SASOL Synfuels (Pty.) Ltd.

As the saying goes, "The only constant is change." Nowhere is this more true than in today's utility sector. With increased competition, mergers and acquisitions, systems reliability, and both economic and regulatory pressures, energy and utility companies are challenged in ways never before faced.

To not only survive, but evolve into a stronger organisation that can succeed in this changing marketplace, utilities need to find new ways to reduce costs, improve business processes and increase return on assets. Companies must focus on the creation of an effective Performance Culture.

The Performance Culture is all about discipline. Self-discipline to agree on a work process, examine it from every standpoint and make sure it will work, and then follow it until perfection is achieved. It's about work behaviors, leading, communicating, staying on point, doing our jobs well, and on schedule. It's about being accountable for our actions and the ways in which they impact our coworkers and the environment, and making sure everyone is successful. It's the essence of teamwork, where we plan the job before we start, and leave as little uncertainty as possible.

Achieving a Performance Culture requires more than simply adopting the latest 'best-practice' programmes for improved processes and efficiencies. It requires implementing a holistic programme that changes the DNA of your organisation and the behaviour of your entire population to deliver real, sustainable change.

Behavioural change is key to the success of the implementation of any strategic plan so it is important to engage functional and change management experts. Change is the critical barrier that must be overcome on the road to success. Organisations seldom fail because they don't understand best practices, but rather because they are unable to implement them. Training alone will not create new behaviours. People at all levels of an organisation need to be included and share ownership of the processes, as well as to be coached for new behaviours, with metrics put in place to determine success. After all, the only changes that will have a lasting impact in the plant are those that are supported by the guy on the plant floor as well as the CEO.

Based on decades of industry and consulting expertise, SAMI has developed a revolutionary approach for coaching behavioural change to ensure long-term sustainable change and lead to the creation of a new and effective Performance Culture. As Sun Tzu, the original management consultant, observed, change will not happen because you ask for it nor demand it. True, sustainable change will only happen because you facilitate it. The SAMI Ascend™ Programme is a philosophy that encompasses a unique Model, Process and Tool that embed the behavioural change necessary to guarantee consistent and sustainable success. The Programme focuses on the necessary elements to bring the best possible results within an organization; the right practices, behaviours and managing system.

Ascend™ to new heights

To climb any great mountain, you must have the proper tools, the right guide, extensive knowledge and experience, as well as the guts and determination to reach the top. It is a similarly difficult and demanding journey to create a Performance Culture. SAMI's Ascend™ Programme provides the necessary tools to embed the behavioural change necessary to guarantee consistent and sustainable success:

The Ascend™ Model is a philosophy that ensures consistent plans, objectives and cooperative involvement within the organization to obtain the highest value from facility assets; The Ascend™ Pyramid demonstrates a systematic and logical approach to develop best practices for production, maintenance, logistics, Greenfield development and management; The Ascend™ Process implementation methodology engages our clients own staff to design and implement new requirements with SAMI's subject matter experts coaching clients towards a new Performance Culture;  APEX™, the Ascend™ Tool, is proprietary software that monitors the behavioural patterns and Key Performance Indicators across an organization.

By utilizing the Ascend™ Model, Ascend™ Process, Ascend™ Tool and SAMI's unmatched depth of experience, the result is consistent and sustainable success.

Send for SAMI: Real world success stories

The SAMI Ascend™ Program has delivered successful, sustainable results for a number of industrial clients over the past 14 years. Here are a few examples illustrating how SAMI helped large global organizations change behaviors and improve processes:

Shell Exploration and Production West (SEPCo) operates a number of oil and natural gas production units in the Gulf of Mexico, Southern Texas and the Rocky Mountains.

SEPCo had initiated several attempts in the past to improve facility maintenance operations. These initiatives failed to gain adequate traction within the organization to institutionalize the work processes and discipline required to achieve the desired asset reliability and maintenance performance. Additionally, several initiatives were underway that were aimed at improving operating process reliability.

SEPCo management came to the conclusion that asset reliability and process reliability are in fact interdependent and decided that an integrated initiative aimed at both process and equipment reliability would improve the pace and penetration of the implementation.

SAMI began its work with an assessment of the current state of the maintenance practices as part of a Focused Results Delivery (FRD) process. The purpose of the FRD was to establish an aligned vision and clear accountabilities for measurable performance improvement and addressed the weaknesses in strategy, processes, methods and tools commonly used to manage assets at the SEPCo operating locations. Working as part of an integrated cross functional management team, SAMI and SEPCo consultants and coaches developed a strategic plan to include operational initiatives that would improve SEPCo's processes, systems and practices. Once the strategy was developed, a detailed implementation plan was created using a wave approach that would provide cycles of learning throughout the organization.

Results: The results exceed the projections and the potential upside forecasted in the business case. The Strategic Plan identified gaps and recommended actions and a business case to invest $12M and achieve $250M. The benefits were captured at $26M USD in expense savings and $700M USD in production cash-flow improvement. In addition, major improvements became clear in the key process metrics and leading indicators with manpower utilization at 57% and reactive work reduced by 46%.

SASOL Synthetic Fuels (SASOL) operates the world's only coal-based synfuels manufacturing facility at Secunda, South Africa. The operation is the largest manufacturing facility in the Southern Hemisphere and produces approximately 750 million tons of products annually.

The SASOL Operations Group had attempted to correct deficiencies in equipment reliability, excessive lost production, and spiraling maintenance costs over the previous years with modest success. The vastness of the facility additionally contributed to highly diverse approaches and processes applied to maintenance and reliability. SASOL was spending in excess of R1.20 billion ($200 Million) annually on maintenance.

The SASOL/SAMI team developed a multi-year Operating Strategic Plan, validated a new work management process, and then developed the training, documentation and timetable for implementation across the facility. A three wave system for implementation was constructed to minimize the impact and cost to this huge facility.

Collaboratively, SAMI and SASOL consultants and coaches from the Design Team plus other trained and motivated individuals from the various business units first implemented the new processes then began a "sustaining" phase to firmly imbed the new ways of working and thinking about work management in each unit. The Teams utilized a scorecard developed during the design phase to track progress in each unit weekly. If a unit appeared to slip off the pace set for progress, troops were remobilized to provide additional assistance in that area.

At the completion of the sustaining period, each business unit was audited for compliance to the new ways of doing business and for the proper behaviors that predict the sustainability of the initiative. All business units achieved SAMI Stage 1 certification level prior to the end of the set schedule for the project.

Results: The project netted a significant reduction in maintenance expense, nearly R175 Million (nearly $30 Million) for a substantial multiple return on their investment. The true significance of the initiative was that six widely divergent business units were pulled into an aligned method and common processes for maintaining the reliability of the operation. Emergency work is now only 20% of the initial reading, crew efficiency has nearly doubled and maintenance work schedule compliance on a weekly basis approaches 90% on a consistent basis.

SAMI Benefits - Actual vs. Target

Recent transformations in the utility sector demand that companies change to survive. For more information about how SAMI can help your company evolve to a higher level, contact Brad Peterson at bpeterson@samicorp.com or visit www.samicorp.com.