Enlightenment from Egypt: closer is better
Regionalization is one of four pillars in our strategy to set new industry standards for customer service. We're decentralizing – moving more facilities, expertise and authority into all key regions. We are investing in local infrastructures and economies – creating more resources to shorten initial response and final delivery times, and new training centers to develop local talent.
Our contract with Egyptian LNG (ELNG) began in July 2005 and covers all parts, maintenance, engineering and associated human resources. There are stringent performance requirements for both planned and unplanned events, and their effects on availability guarantees for inspection and non-inspection years.
Expertise & efficiency
From a human resource perspective, GE's regionalization strategy gives industry veterans the opportunity to return home, as well as giving young people a foot in the door of an exceptional training program.
In October 2006, our site team included three Italians, two Indians and four Egyptians. In support of ELNG’s local content initiatives, GE began a recruitment campaign to hire the best available experienced Egyptian technicians – resulting in a current team of one Italian and nine Egyptians. With the majority of Technical Advisors and crew members now living and working in their homeland, we eliminate much of the time and cost commitments from the recurring training and briefing that are required with normal turnover of foreign personnel. Non-essential redundancy is minimized at the same time as we enhance long-term continuity of expertise.
Unplanned service outages are a reality across the LNG industry. Traditional responses involve transporting qualified crews and equipment from central locations, often requiring days before diagnostics could even begin, let alone problem solving. But now, with GE's decentralized service centers, qualified crews are on site within 24 hours. And they're familiar with the intricacies of each client's operations. This new approach reduces lost production time and saves millions of dollars in associated costs for both planned and unplanned activities.
In fact, this past May, we achieved one of the fastest Liner Plus Transition Piece Inspections ever performed in the industry. Our contract commitment for each train was nine days – but we completed the first in five and the second in just 3.5 days. Cost savings from recovered production days were obviously in the millions.
We are very proud to say that ELNG presented our crew with an award of outstanding achievement for this job. The company CEO himself, Adnan Z Abidin, made the presentation.
Commitment and cooperation
The secrets to success were planning and resources. Our technical team reviewed logs from the previous shutdown in 2006 and, using GE's Lean Six Sigma criteria, analyzed all critical activities and isolated opportunities to improve methods, save time and better align resources. As well, one simply cannot ignore the speed and efficiency benefits that result from eliminating language and procedural barriers.
For GE, localization isn't limited to our team and facilities. It also involves procurement of additional labour and equipment from local sources, and working with specialized local subcontractors to further enhance responsiveness to planned and unplanned activities. Local subcontractor crews were involved in the debriefing process for the inspection shutdowns discussed above, since they were crucial members of the team supervised by GE's TAs.
Daily team meetings between GE and ELNG personnel made it possible to effectively coordinate and monitor all activities and achieve the significantly expedited May 2007 shut down. Our people work closely on an ongoing basis and there is a genuine sense of camaraderie on site. We also use the customer's workshop in case of emergencies and there is sharing of resources and equipment between their site and ours. This kind of cooperation is only possible though dedicated regionalization.
We feel this closeness will lead to a stronger relationship and more success in the future. Another recent advantage of this alliance with ELNG is the new Employee Health & Safety initiative launched during our last Semi-Annual meeting. This pilot project is being supervised by GE's EHS manager, who is extremely well-versed in ELNG's corporate culture and business practices, having worked with them for a number of years in the past. The development timeline is set at 1.5 years and we're looking forward to the results, and expect that it will become an industry benchmark for EHS monitoring for years to come.
For more information please contact:
Adriano Pettinelli
Adriano.Pettinelli@ge.com
