Solution delivered by our Consultants

Matrixx Solutions Director spent time with the Company’s COO to fully understand his specific requirements, then sourced specialists who could give the COO the specific feedback he wanted.  

The company recognised the importance of inspection, fabric maintenance and services work processes, to prevent corrosion and to extend the life of their terminal. However, a recent Juran Benchmarking study identified the terminal as being higher cost than comparators in their peer group. The COO wanted an external view of how productive current working practices were, and to see if there were any opportunities to improve it.  

Matrixx Solutions undertook the work in two phases.

Phase 1 consisted of completing a thorough documentation review, and spending time at the company’s gas processing terminal, shadowing and interviewing inspectors, scaffolders, painters and insulators, and site supervisors and other leaders. By spending time with the workforce, the Matrixx consultants were able to observe first-hand some of the inefficiencies in existing working practices, and hear ideas from the workers about how efficiencies could be improved.  

Our team identified three major efficiency improvement areas, including: Improving application of Technology, Reducing insulation on site and optimising inspection frequencies, and Driving productivity and efficiency improvements.

The objective of Phase 2 was to develop an Improvement Plan that the terminal leaders and workforce could use to implement new technologies and lock in new ways of working.  

During this phase, the COO asked us how we could make his team feel ownership of the agreed improvement plan. The approach our team took was to hold engaging deep-dive workshops with leaders, workers and subject matter experts into each of the improvement areas. They were conducted in a collaborative manner and were designed to showcase the Phase 1 findings and then engage the workshop attendees to make improvements to their day-to-day working practices. The workshops worked very well and allowed people to come up with practical solutions that could be readily implemented on their site.

During each of the workshops, the Matrixx Consultants introduced best practices from elsewhere, for consideration. For example, another terminal operator had moved to using one coat painting systems, rather than 3-coat systems, for structural steel. This reduced time and cost of painting operations. The external best practices were coarsely assessed during the workshops, and those that were identified as being worthy of further review were added to the Improvement Plan.

During the workshop on Driving productivity and efficiency improvements, our consultants engaged participants on what they’d like to leave behind, keep, and add. Once the key areas had been identified, the participants worked together to create specific actions that were incorporated into the Improvement Plan. Afterwards they worked together to identify the potential prize. This generated efficiency and safety improvement type measures as well as motivational measures.  All this helped to engage attendees on additions to the Improvement Plan.

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The outputs from the workshops were collated into a comprehensive Improvement Plan that the site leadership team owned.  

The Matrixx Consultants spent time planning how to make the Improvement Plan sustainable once they had left site. This was achieved by:

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• Conducting coaching sessions with the leaders who were rolling out the Improvement Plan to their teams, to improve their confidence of delivery.

• Working with the COO to incorporate the Improvement Plan into existing business processes. It is now reviewed at the site’s quarterly performance review.

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This helped the terminal make sustained improvements, and the Improvement Plan has now taken on a life of its own, with new improvement ideas being regularly added to it and delivered.

Business Outcomes

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Testimonial

"Many thanks to the Matrixx Solutions team for supporting us over the last four months. I really liked the insights you came forward with. They helped shine a light on a number of our work practices and bring focus to areas which need our attention.  

Thank you for helping generate the Improvement Plan: we will now take ownership of the plan and move it forward!

Overall, I really liked your work and will be recommending your services to one of my colleagues." _{Eric, COO}