AM-02-09 ACHIEVING PROACTIVE MANUFACTURING Learnings in leadership on our journey to become a world-class refinery

Description:

Over the last two years we have embarked on a journey to transform Premcor’s Port Arthur, Texas refinery into a world-class facility with Pacesetter performance. This is the second such effort for some of the leadership team who also helped to transform the Lima, Ohio plant. On our journey to a more proactive approach with superior performance we have encountered many of the standard road blocks: shop floor workers who have grown cynical of change efforts, too many emergencies to start any new efforts, inability to get funding for improvement efforts and the difficulty of engaging supervisors who are overworked. During the current implementation at Port Arthur and the earlier one at Lima, we have experimented and worked hard to discover what the proper role for leadership is in this sort of an effort. Over time, through trial and error we have developed a set of leadership principles that have worked well for us in achieving our performance goals and creating a better place to work.