Utilities Sector

Context

One of the nations largest provincial utilities was targeting specific improvements in Safety, Reliability and Efficiency in order to increase reliability and customer service to provincial ratepayers and meet internal metric objectives and targets.

Actions

Using a multidisciplinary approach of targeted frontline leadership coaching focused on work execution, process improvement, management system implementation and enhanced use of data, the Engine Room supported this organization in exceeding their performance expectations.

Safety
The most effective enabler of world-class safety is a highly engaged workforce. Engine Room team members provided targeted tools and coaching to frontline leadership focused on:
- Positively resetting field safety expectations.
- Crews significantly involved in safety meeting prep and delivery.
- Providing leadership tools to guide the building of a safety accountability culture.
- Process improvements to streamline cascading safety communication.
- Improving safety meeting preparation, focus and management.
- Aligning dashboards to safety actions on leader’s individual calendars.
- Effective job-site visits (for feedback and coaching).

Efficiency
To impact efficiency Engine Room coaches worked directly with leadership at all levels or the organization to increase time on tools for skilled line crews through:
- Increasing frontline leadership time in the field and improving the quality of field visits.
- Raising awareness of metrics for leadership and crews to drive desired behaviours.
- Proactively dealing with performance issues and challenging circumstances.
- Establishing business review meeting structures to anchor results based expectations.
- Matching crew capacity to available work on a daily basis.
- Aligning 80% of leaderships tasks/actions to dashboard targets
- Supporting leaderships use of data and scheduling tools to manage crew productivity

Reliability
With a primary focus of providing reliable power and service to ratepayers the Engine Room coaches worked with managers and crews to improve outage response times and work on preventative actions that may impact the grid through:
- Providing tools to guide the building of a response time accountability culture.
- Communication and outage prevention action planning via revised meeting structures.
- Establishing controls for system component failures.
- Regional crew asset re-organization based on data and metric trends.
- Creating reliability improvement teams to strengthen large scale system improvements.
- Introduced a “fix it now” policy with immediate repair actions and documentation.

Results

Lost Time Incident reduction of 75%.
4% increase in labour utilization supporting $ 4.5 million in savings improvements.
14% improvement for in-service date compliance.
17% improvement in emergent trouble response.
3% reduction in over-time labour costs.
Improved frontline leadership business literacy, focus on safety, ownership of results, accountability for utilization, planning, scheduling and budget management.