Notes from the Turbine Deck

The 2012 Spring outage season is well under way on turbine decks across the country.  Access Solutions FME Accountability Technicians are working diligently to assist skilled professionals as they disassemble and reassemble critical power generation equipment, by accounting for foreign materials, peer-checking personnel and tooling, promoting procedural adherence and most importantly, working safely.  Following are a few examples of our resources already making a difference on the turbine decks:

> Before entering the FME zone a small, non-critical screw was noted missing by the Accountability Technician, from fine instrumentation during routine inspection.  Detailed inspection and descriptive logging prevented a “false positive” intrusion event and the project was spared delay and expense.

> An FME barrier were noted as still logged into a pedestal.  This was communicated to project management by the FME Accountability Technician.  The barrier was removed before installation of pedestal cover preventing potential equipment damage and reducing potential for an expensive delay.

> It was brought to the attention of supervision that an electrical cord “tree” leg which extended into a walkway was not flagged as a trip hazard.  It was rectified, preventing potential worker injury.

I’ll post more successes as they continue to come in.   It’s up to all of us in the FME discipline and the power generation industry in general, to continue promoting safety and excellence through a questioning attitude, eyes-on-path, three-way communication and other valuable human performance tools. Great job!

Cheers, E-

FME “Accountability Technician” vs. “monitor”

Why does Access Solutions provide “Accountability Technicians” instead of “monitors”?

Access Solutions Accountability Technicians on deck

The term “FME monitor” has been used pervasively in the power generation industry to describe anyone who monitors a Foreign Material Exclusionary zone and has achieved at least the minimum training requirement (2-8 hours from my observations).  I am certain that there are intelligent, observant, personable, capable individuals in these roles and after enough time, they have considerable experience.

Access Solutions takes a more extension approach and raises the bar by requiring Accountability Technician candidates to attend 40 hours of mixed-media training consisting of on-line and classroom training including a number of Dynamic Learning Activities (DLAs).  At this point they must pass testing to be certified capable of attending the NEXT level of training, mentored on-site training.

On-site training is conducted until the mentoring senior technician, the Access Solutions FME Supervisor and the trainee are confident of the individual’s capabilities in a number of areas.  ONLY at such time are they certified to handle a position at the FME desk.  Even after all of this, Access Solutions considers these people “new” techs…even though they may already have 40 hours or more of practical experience!

So, it’s about differentiating a highly skilled, certified tradesperson from one who passes the minimum requirements.

This scratches the surface of how Access Solutions is positioned as the leader in the industry; the most highly trained FME staff available.  We’ll talk more about “raising the bar” in another post.

Cheers! E-

My FME is your Clean Conditions…

 The 2011 U.S. outage season is well underway for Access Solutions, who’s had a large project team deployed all year long!  Well, the year is only 6 days old at time of this writing, but that doesn’t diminish the extensive ramp-up the company is undergoing.  The world-wide power industry is also ramping-up for extended power upgrades, new plant construction and new technologies, all on top of regular maintenance cycles which is leading to a big year for FME.

 FME practices in the U.S. continue to grow and mature as they do in other parts of the world.  I recently returned from POWER-GEN International in Orlando, Florida where I had the occasion to speak with people of other countries who also work with these practices, but call them by another name: Clean Conditions.

 The terminology and a few of the methods may be slightly different, but the goal of both Foreign Material Exclusion and Clean Conditions is the same: keeping critical power-generation machinery safe and operating (for a refresher on FME click here).  The most interesting difference is the varying degree to which these practices are applied.

Access Solutions at Power-Gen International

In some countries there is greater focus on access requirements.  If you’ve ever been in an FME Area one zone in the U.S., you know how serious this is taken.  You must first be authorized into the zone and then checked in and out by the Accountability Technician.  Some countries take this a step farther by utilizing detection equipment and turnstiles to control entry points.

Another variation I heard about was in housekeeping standards and who takes responsibility.  Some FME Service organizations also provide staff to regularly clean the zone and have ultimate responsibility for adherence.  Clean Conditions personnel in some countries are also granted authority, utilizing proper protocol of course, to refuse access to entrants who do not follow procedures and can even play a part in barring future entry!

 Part of the difference in how vigorous the practices are applied has to do with history, for instance the severity and root cause of foreign material related incidences.   The level of concern over sabotage is an example.  A primary difference as I see it, is the variety in plant ownership and labor structure.  A government owned plant will embody a different culture than one corporately owned and the relationship and responsibility-sharing between the plant ownership, plant management, contractors and sub-contractors each effect the culture at every level.

 So, no matter which term you use, FME or Clean Conditions,  it is critically important to the safe, reliable and efficient operation of power generating facilities around the world.  Let’s all encourage the sharing of best practices and lessons learned between cultures to continually improve conditions for everyone.

 Cheers! E-

Look for more on The Cube next post

FME 2011: Foreign Material Exclusion in the New Year

 If 2010 is any indication of FME growth and innovation in 2011, hold on for a wild ride! 

As the year comes to a close, you’ll find Access Solutions at Power Gen International promoting it’s industry-leading, core FME Accountability Services.  Be sure to look into the company’s innovative product lines as well: 

Join Access Solutions at Power-Gen Booth 1601!

♦ FME S.T.A.R.trac® -  The release of the new Enterprise version of FME S.T.A.R.trac makes it possible to operate and manage a large number of desks, workstations and read-points all the while capturing critical data for use at  individual plants and corporate headquarters.  Partner S3Edge built new Auto-ID capabilities  into the system (it can be run manually, reading bar-codes and reading RFID tags in any combination) creating an environment that allows the highest accuracy and efficiency with the most flexibility.

♦ Access Secure® tool tethering process and products reduce tool drops and labor and can be configured to compliment FME S.T.A.R.trac® RFID capabilities.  Access Solution’s tether methodology is quickly becoming the industry standard and the unique process Access Solutions uses to secure tool tethers can be used in conjunction with most common tool lanyards but is especially suited to the sturdy Access Secure® lanyard.

♦ The Access FME Center (a.k.a. “The Cube”®) is the newest addition to the Access family.  It is a fully self-contained FME station built for the most robust outdoor environments (it’s equally efficient indoors!) while maintaining a small footprint.  The Cube® contains everything needed to run an efficient FME project including built-in storage, furnishings, technology…even HVAC!

Well the power industry has a busy maintenance schedule in 2011 starting immediately in January.  Besides the usual turbine and generator inspection work, there are a number of Extended Power Upgrades and generator rewinds – a speciality of Access Solutions!

To meet the record 2011 demand, Access Solutions is continuing to add Accountability Technicians to it’s team.  If you are looking for a rewarding and flexible career, consider joining this team of highly trained professionals yourself!  Access Solutions Job openings

I’ll provide a review of Power-Gen International in the weeks to come.

Cheers!  E-

Expanding FME Services Business Fuels Job Growth

Flying in the face of current economic news, Foreign Material Exclusion service provider Access Solutions, LLC reports continued expansion to meet growing demand, which they forecast will continue on a steep growth curve for the foreseeable future.  Having  recently graduated another class of Accountability Technicians from the Access Solutions training facility, Access is already planning the next training sessions as they look to fill openings for the 2011 spring outage season and beyond.

Long recognized as the leader in power industry FME services, Access Solutions continues to raise the industry standards bar.  Not only are they expanding their already stringent training curriculum, but by developing new innovations to address efficiencies, increase accountability and vastly improve data access, they have seen growing client excitement to deploy these advances beginning in 2011.  Look for Access Solutions to provide information on their Access FME Services, their enterprise RFID system - FME S.T.A.R.trac® , advanced lanyard systems, the Access FME Cube® and more at POWERGEN this December.

If you want to see where the FME discipline is headed, keep watching this company as it adds personnel, adds products and continues its upward trajectory!

E-

Access Solutions Accountability Training Rousing Success!

As the fall outage season gets under way, Access Solutions graduated another class of professional Accountability Technicians.  This group was unique, in that it was the first to benefit from the Access Solutions Training Center, constructed in December of 2009.  Since that time, management has been working hard to outfit the center with industry-specific materials and audio-visual technologies necessary to thoroughly conduct multiple methods of training for the best understanding, awareness and retention.  The next phase in their training cycle is mentored training on working job sites.  They will soon be followed by another class of aspiring technicians as Access Solutions grows to meet the demand for its services.

After the training classes were complete, accountability supervisory staff  participated in the pre-season supervisors meeting and training session conducted to communicate the latest procedural updates, lessons learned and upcoming tools designed to increase efficiencies and raise the bar yet-again on FME accountability insuring that Access Solutions remains the leading standard for FME services.

Have a great and safe season everyone!

E-

FME vs FOD

My dad used to watch all-star wrestling on TV. 

He liked one particular actor named “The Crusher.”  Of course, all of the various named challengers would lose under The Crusher’s grip.  FME vs FOD, however, is not a wrestling match in any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, they are kind of like tag-team partners who unfortunately wrestle in different rings.

In my world, FME stands for Foreign Material Exclusion.  Within this context FOD stands for Foreign Object Detection.  I didn’t find reference material on the comparison of the two so here’s my humble opinion.  When you think FOD, think macro and when you think FME think micro.  Another way to look at them is that FOD is outside and FME is inside.  FME came to us via the nuclear power industry and FOD via the aerospace industry.

When considering FOD think of debris that must be removed from a runway; debris that could conceivably get sucked into a jet engine.  FME works to eliminate foreign objects that mischievously try to find their way into a machine, like an object in a nuclear power plant generator or turbine that isn’t supposed to be there.  Whereas FOD seems to concentrate on object removal, FME seems to edge out the competition in terms of foreign object prevention.  FME also does not encompass areas the size of a runway but rather zones which are smaller in size and tightly controlled at the access point.  Please don’t get pinned to the mat over my little example.  FOD & FME both do consider prevention and with advances in RFID tracking, both will benefit greatly in terms of accuracy, accountability, identification and in a host of other areas.

So FME & FOD share a discipline in different industries.  If the personnel administering the standard operating procedures in both, do so with an attitude of total ownership, well, we can rest assured that no foreign materials or debris will stop our big machines, no matter in which ring they wrestle.

E-

RFID & Resin

I’m sitting at the FMEA-1 desk for the generator rewind at CR3 watching the winders apply resin, a bubble gum colored goop, to the exposed generator coils.

My teammate and I provide FME control for the zone; of the blue plastic bags used to protect coil ends and the hundreds of wipers (rags), not to mention boxes, tubes, Dacron, tools, totes, etc.  Resin is a sticky mess until it hardens, at which time it becomes a monolithic rock along with anything it touches.  There is some resin on the tools, totes, boxes… I can deal with that.  I inspect and record each item to insure it is intact upon exiting the zone, but the consumables?  That’s a bag of a different color.

I had hoped to post a picture of wipers and bags enshrined by resin, and still may if I get my hands on one.  Check back if you tire of watching the evening news.  Anyway, each bag, each wiper receives a number written in more than one location on the item to insure that the Access FME Accountability Tech still has a good chance of uniquely identifying that item.  The glob of 20-30 mixed consumables in front of me looks like a big wad of bubblegum chewed by a giant, except that he forgot to take the paper wrapper off before he began chewing.

Snapping on my rubber gloves like a gastrointestinal surgeon, I dive into a pink-blue-white wad which yields a high percentage of legible numbers which we clear from the accountability log.  However, the remaining resin ball refuses to be teased apart.  I can’t tell if this patient will live as I grunt and groan for another ten minutes or so.  By reverse osmosis we are finally able to accurately quantify the remaining items to balance our books, but not without trepidation due to a dearth of more exacting ID.

Flash forward a few months to the Access Solutions training and development center.  A similar wad of resin covered material is walked over to a table.  The undifferentiated wad is set on the table where a device lights-up and reads the RFID tags incorporated into each independent item.  Sixty wipers show on the screen, by number, showing the time that each was brought into the test “zone” and by whom…IN SIX SECONDS.

Six seconds.  I can’t even chew a stick of bubble gum in that amount of time.

NEXT TIME: FME vs FOD

E-

RFID FME ASAP… What?!

Life is coming at me pretty fast these days; seems like each year goes by faster than the one before it. 

I used to think that the pace of time was relative to the number of children I had, but at the end of child-rearing, time continued to accelerate, like being in bucket at the end of a rope being swung around in the air, only the rope keeps getting shorter.  From my conversations, I am not the only human being faced with this crisis of acceleration.

Everyone I talk to uses the “B” word.  You  know.  You ask someone how things are and they respond, “Busy.”  I am asked how my life is or why I haven’t emailed back or why I haven’t called my mother; “I’ve been busy.”  I need to get over it and quit empowering “busy” to have so much control over me.  Heck.  I’m even working at removing the word from my vocabulary.  We need a new paradigm that accepts the fact that life is and will continue to accelerate.  

Our technologies have provided a way for us to be more productive in this acceleration, giving us the fleeting illusion that we are making up time.  My wife and I occasionally muse, ‘What if we just got rid of the three computers in the office, the two PDAs, the smart phone (Gasp. NOT the Ipod!)?  Would life slow down?  Yeup, bummer.  It would take longer to do things (Duh. This is after all, the goal).  So in response we keep our technologies humming right along.

Within the scope of my job as an FME Accountability Technician, time is less important than accuracy – a welcome relief.  Sure the job gets bus… “eventful” as I manually record each person and item, check for proper PPE and removal of personal items, inspect condition and authorization status of tools.  I have longed for a way that I could decrease error potential, increase my efficiency and  reduce the callous on my writing finger.  Well, writing fingers rejoice!

If you aren’t already aware, RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification.  It’s the technology that in essence puts little license plates on things that can then be read automatically using radio frequencies which are then recorded in a computer.  Applied to FME, I can now allow the technology do the heavy lifting of recording things and concentrate my efforts on inspection.  Of course, not everything can get tagged.  RFID ”tagging” is the equivalent of a gang of hooligans spray painting their logo on the side of a building to mark their territory, only RFID goes farther by issuing a unique number to each circuit “tag” and it requires less paint remover.

With the right tagging and RFID system implemented,  the presence of people, tools and consumables are announced by my computer, but since not all things are tagged, I need only type the exceptions into the computer and at break-finger speed, the next person can be processed ASAP.  Higher accuracy and production, we save trees, we save ink and we replace the writing  callous with a typing callous.  Could the speed of life in FME be any better?

E-

Next post: more about RFID

Housekeeping Starts in My Garage

I walked into my garage the other day looking for a tool I desperately needed.  I couldn’t find it.

Contrary to what people who know me might suggest, I’m not an organizing fanatic who outlines each tool in its hanging place on the wall of my workshop.  In the course of daily business I do organize quite a bit (OK maybe MORE than just a bit), but at home in my shop I utilize a globally recognized and intricate standard known as ”The Pile” method.   Who gets credit for this method I’m not sure, though based on its efficiency, I would guess Gomer Pyle USMC; if you are younger than 40, check YouTube and you’ll understand.

It used to be I knew where every pile was and what was in each pile.  Unfortunately over the years, my number of piles and projects-in-progress (I’m also a “plate spinner” but we’ll leave that for another post) have grown exponentially and I remember less of just exactly what comprises each of those piles.

My workbench is the Mother Of All Piles (M.O.A.P.), an eclectic mixture of garden materials, hand tools for building fine furniture, a gopher trap or two, half a dozen pieces of exotic hardwood, maybe an interesting article clipped from an obscure technical magazine…you get the picture.  Getting back to my issue, time, age and events conspired against me and, against all powers of reason, I could not find sought after tool.

If you’ve made it this far, you may be asking yourself, “OK. (yawn) How does this apply to FME?”  In another post I’ve discussed the meaning of FME and the basic conceptual approach.  What I want to touch upon here is how FME is interrelated with other disciplines, in this case, housekeeping. 

So that I did not misplace a tool, I could hire a housekeeping-type person to clean and organize my workshop, but I wouldn’t do it.  Sure I could use the help, but it’s my little shop and it doesn’t affect anyone else.  Now put dozens of other people in this same space without each of us cleaning up after ourselves…chaos!  What happens when one person leaves an M.O.A.P. of rags, tools, containers, their safety harness, components, bolts, etc. in the work area?  How easy is it to lose something inadvertently?  How simple is it to accidentally kick something, sending it flying into oblivion?  Where is oblivion anyway?

What if it’s just a little ole’ bolt laying on the deck next to my tool bucket?  From projects I’ve worked, it is pretty simple math to see that if housekeeping awareness was a supported priority, some of the lost productivity surrounding tracking objects so that they do not become foreign material could be recaptured.  And if that bolt gets bumped into a machine opening?  Well that’s escalates my case to a whole another level. 

Does housekeeping eliminate foreign material issues?  No, but it’s a necesary base from which to start.  If it were better employed during FME we’d be more efficient and reduce object drops…and if used in my garage, I might not be whining about my misplaced tool.  What tool was it I needed anyway?  Talk about your lost productivity.

E-