ABB Engineering Services’, operations improvement group, has extended its contract with SASOL to continue the work in raising the operational performance of the manufacturing business units.
Past work included benchmarking 10 plants which led to the development of an operations excellence management system, that defined the standards (or expectations) of business practices in an organisation operating at excellent levels of performance.
SASOL plant in Secunda, South Africa
Using these practices standards and measuring hard performance against a range of key metrics, ABB has conducted a baseline on a further 12 plants worldwide and facilitated improvement teams focused on the issues raised. Step changes in performance have been achieved by full time task teams of production and engineering personnel, supported by part time task teams of senior and middle managers.
Senior teams have focused on issues such as value chain integration, whilst middle managers have often reduced systemic wastes around business processes and procedures across functional silos. Additionally the group has helped to develop SASOL’s own
internal consultancy group with the expressed intention of these people taking control of the process for themselves without the need for external consultants.
Due to the successes achieved by the two groups of consultants (ABB and internal), resulting in a conservative return on investment ratio of 10:1, SASOL has engaged ABB for a further year to maintain the progress. SASOL is also interested in improving safety, energy and asset integrity performance with a similar approach.