Hot, Fast Summer

Top expert teams from craft labor affiliate APM, as well as PGS North America Field Services, PGS Global Services Excellence and Customer Outage Engineering spent a week in Greenville, SC at the new 7FA.03 Gas Turbine Outage Simulator (GTOS) focused on reducing the number of craft labor man hours associated with a 7FA Major Inspection. Prior to working on the GTOS, the teams spent a day in Mooresville, NC (Race City, USA) learning the inner workings of motorsports pit crews and the critical essence of speed and productivity in that industry.   

The learnings from the pit crew experience parlayed well into the execution of an outage…proper planning, tooling, training and teamwork.  However, there were many other best practices shared and realized.   Each pit stop is choreographed for every task, action, human movement, tool handling, etc...each task is also filmed, evaluated, reviewed, critiqued and re-performed to flawless precision.   

These same techniques were brought to Greenville’s Gas Turbine Outage Simulator (GTOS) where GE Field Engineers and APM’s Superintendents performed “pit stops” on several critical path 7FA Major Inspection (MI) tasks. The team reviewed, updated, executed, filmed and critiqued a number of GE Field Procedures. The key Field Procedures that were reviewed were:

• Installation of the Transition Pieces

• Installation of the Forward Combustion Casings

• Installation of the Exhaust Casing

The goal of the event was to lean out the craft man hours for these critical path tasks, identify new productivity tooling, and to create the best in class (BIC) craft labor training materials to be used at APM’s new Training & Development Center which is scheduled to be completed in Pasadena, Texas in September 2014.  

The session truly highlighted the power of the GTOS when you combine the right people in the right atmosphere where all of the knowledge, equipment, tooling, procedures and innovation are encapsulated in one place.

Special thanks to the Customer Outage Engineering organization and the following team members:

• Don Potter – Field Execution, Global Services Excellence

• Tom Mogle – Customer Outage Engineering

• Jack Nolan – Customer Outage Engineering

• Josh Oden – Customer Outage Engineering

• Krystal Coltrane – Customer Outage Engineering

• Bill Mitchell – North America Field Engineer

• Deb Mitchell – North America Field Engineer

• Larry Crim – North America Field Engineer

• Mark Benacquisto – APM VP Operations

• James Krachinski – APM Training Manager

• Ed Menees – APM Superintendent

• Mike Hill – APM Superintendent

• Alex Blas – APM Superintendent

• Wes Heck – APM Superintendent

• Allen Lemaster – APM Superintendent