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NuclearPlantJournal.com Nuclear Plant Journal, March-April 2014
Long-Term...
collaboration and consistency in outage
management and execution practices.
D&Z’s staff maintains a keen focus on
regular, structured communications to
assure clarity on customer expectations
as well as progress toward team goals.
5.
How does the management define
performance indicators that ensure
accountability and also allows the
management to quantify success or failure
and indicate areas for improvement?
Day & Zimmermann’s alliances and
partnering relationships with our nuclear
customers allow us the most flexibility to
leverage the use of consistent standards,
solutions and best practices across the
fleets of nuclear plants that we service.
When given a seat at the table with our
customers, we can jointly share ideas
and collaborate to define and establish
key performance indicators (KPIs) and
pay-for-performance measures. These
measures are tracked and adjusted to
enable us to focus precisely on areas
of improvement in processes, driving
efficiency and reducing costs for our
customers.
6.
How does the management ensure
that outage activities are completed in a
minimum time while ensuring quality and
continued safety of the reactor core?
For each of our outages/projects,
D&Z performs extensive onsite pre-
outage assessments to ensure that specific
schedule milestones and deliverables
are fully aligned with our customer’s
expectations and requirements. D&Z
establishes peer teams consisting of
operations directors, site managers,
project controls and safety personnel
to conduct an independent verification
review of the D&Z’s outage scope
preparedness. The review process enables
best practices and lessons learned from
other outages to be leveraged and applied
to each upcoming outage. Pre-outage
assessments encompass outage planning
and readiness, labor resource availability
and mobilization plans, cost and schedule
goals, safety plans, risk-to-generation
plans, constructability analyses, materials
availability plans, and contingency plans
to mitigate unforeseen schedule impacts.
D&Z’s site teams are organized
to provide customers with flexibility
and scalability for contractor control
and cost containment. Our teams are
adept at managing the variable resource
requirements that are often required for
the successful implementation of outage
activities.
7.
What incentives (financial and other)
are used by the management to ensure
optimal efficiency of different groups
as well as the individual craftsmen and
engineers involved in refueling outage?
Day & Zimmermann aligns most
effectively with our customers when
working in a “seat-at-the-table” partnering
contracting strategy that employs a
performance-based scorecard. This
approach allows D&Z’s site teams to work
with our customers to drive consistency,
leverage best practices and process
improvements, and deliver predictable
cost performance. The scorecard is
based on specific and measureable key
performance indicators (KPIs) in safety,
human performance, ALARA, quality,
and personnel contamination events
(PCEs). KPI metrics are developed based
on alignment with the Owner’s fleet-wide
goals as well as outage-specific goals;
during outage execution these metrics
are adjusted as necessary, then tracked,
reported and reviewed on a periodic basis
to ensure that scorecard goals are met or
exceeded.
8.
How does Day & Zimmermann
ensure minimal radiation exposure to its
workers during refueling outages?
Day & Zimmermann works in
close coordination with its customers’
Radiation Protection departments at
their nuclear stations to build ALARA
(as low as reasonably achievable) dose
performance into work package planning,
work preparation, job walkdowns, and
work execution. ALARA considerations
are also incorporated into daily pre-job
briefings to ensure minimal radiation
exposure during the execution of specific
work activities. On “exposure critical”
workscopes, D&Z will assign a dedicated
ALARA coordinator to the project,
starting at the planning phase, to ensure
compliance and to minimize dose.
9.
How has information and internet
technologies helped outage management
to reduce radiation dose and to reduce
outage duration?
Day & Zimmermann is fully
leveraging information technology by
developing and deploying proprietary
software tools that enable our site teams
to continuously improve outage/project
planning and execution, project support,
and safety performance. Our Project
Execution Tool (PET) is a comprehensive
web-based program geared specifically
to enhance contractor preparedness for
outages. The PET is used to optimize
communications, pre-outage planning,
and to consistently update and track the
status of milestones and deliverables
for each upcoming outage. The PET is
customizable to our customers’ specific
outage processes, and features an online
management dashboard and electronic
reporting. In order to ensure a greater
emphasis on planning and preparedness,
D&Z senior management reviews the
PET dashboards on a routine basis.
D&Z has also developed a robust
web-based Environmental Health &
Safety (EHS) tool to capture and report
all Safety-related incidents/injuries, near
misses, and environmental events. The
tool is based on D&Z’s Safety program,
which is founded on the Construction
Industry Institute’s Five Pillars of Zero
Injury program. The EHS tool tracks,
trends, and reports pertinent data to our
site management teams on a real-time
basis to enable their prompt response to
concerns and to share lessons-learned
information across the organization.
