Thread regarding ExxonMobil Corp. layoffs

What is AEST?

@bn "It’s events like this that will eventually convince this company that our outsourcing strategy is a dead end. Look for them to occur with increasing frequency as AEST rolls out."

short term planner accountant is in the driver seat now - one day investors will discover the corporation has been eaten out from the inside through decisions that were "right at the time" and made as a part of cost value basis today the decisions are highly publicized and lauded by index management companies only a matter of time for CEO to be featured on FORBES cover

@fr laughing - logistics and warehouse is one thing now so surprised if they could find and ship the spare.

@a3 add in tons of rain and lightning this week to the mix. It will add days to the restart

@bn this is also when they call on EMTEC for things. Not everyone there is a useless PHds, there are some good eggs who have 100s of TA and start up hours under their belt.

Probably waiting on a motor replacement for the pump, since the spare was tossed due to lack of movement from the storehouse.

Kinda hoping these lessons happen a lot and often to remind the big boss that people truly matter and are core to the company, instead of being just an empty slogan on propaganda videos.

I’m sure Bangalore has everything under control!

@c5 spoken like someone who has been there. Right on the mark.

@c5 nailed it. This is what the hipos do not understand since they have never actually stayed in a job long enough or done actual work to understand the day in and day out of what makes this place actually work.

Ask Barzan in Qatar if restarts are tricky.

In my 30+ years of operations experience I have been involved in multiple shutdown/start up of a refinery thanks to power blips, hurricanes and freezes.

Procedures are necessary. They are not a substitute for people who have actually brought units up, seen what a “normal” heat-up looks like versus a problem one, know which instruments lie, which valves stick, how the particular furnace or column actually behaves when you first introduce hydrocarbons, and when the written step is incomplete or slightly wrong for this plant on this day.
Startup and shutdown are when refineries historically have the most fires, explosions, and near-misses. The procedures exist because those events taught expensive lessons. They still assume operators and supervisors who can recognize when reality has left the script. A leader who has never done it, or who only listens to people who tell them what they want to hear, tends to treat the procedure as a complete instruction set instead of a starting point that still requires judgment.

People get promoted for being agreeable, politically useful, or good at presentations rather than for having run the process.

They then treat experienced operators as obstacles or “old school” instead of the people who actually know where the plant will surprise you.

Decisions get made from conference rooms or from the most recent PowerPoint rather than from the people who have stood on the unit during a difficult start-up.

Good leaders in operations usually do the opposite. They stay close to the people who have done the work, they ask “what am I missing?” instead of “why aren’t you following the procedure,” and they treat disagreement from experienced staff as a signal rather than insubordination.

You cannot start a refinery on procedures alone. You start it with procedures plus people who have already paid the tuition of previous start-ups. When leadership forgets that, the plant usually reminds them.

Another issue is that these "leaders" are too afraid to make a decision because it could affect their precious career. Well........ welcome to the party bud. This is what you are getting paid for.

Running off you most experienced console controllers is going to come back and haunt this company in a bad way. Especially when the sh*t hits the fan.

Refinery startups are very infrequent and complicated things…

That said, I know for a fact that when this happened just a couple years ago all the gulf coast refineries sent what experienced engineers they had left up to Joliet to help out. The inexperience level at Joliet meant they had no way of pulling it off themselves anytime soon.

It’s events like this that will eventually convince this company that our outsourcing strategy is a dead end. Look for them to occur with increasing frequency as AEST rolls out.

You can quickly pay for the salary of those experienced workers you ran off and then some with the lost production. Short sighted.

A power outage and full shut down is dangerous. You have to go through a very specific and gradual sequence to shut down, with risky conditions. Then inspect units for safety and make repairs. Then go through a very specific and gradual process to restart, again with risky conditions. At any point you might have to stop the process, as--s repair and start the process again.