8/19/2013

Group

Gautam Hariharan 12P137

Himanshu Gupta

Rajesh Choudhary

Gaurav Thakur 12P197

1) What challenges does Brown face in creating a process-oriented organization?

How to introduce Change Management : The functional model has been in place at Pinnacle for 120 years due to which people are comfortable working in functional orientation. The change towards process-oriented model will face resistance from employees. Also, the functional model is costly and not as responsive to change.

Precise communication of protocols: APS has been facing the problem related to formal and clear communication from the field and operation’s center and vice versa. There is a need to define the protocols to eliminate the ambiguity, uncertainty and human error in all communications.

Prioritization of work: APS has a task in hand to prioritize all non-trivial transmission and substation systems. The prioritization has to be in accordance with the corporate strategic objectives and values, which is a challenge in itself.

The goal which the company set was to achieve higher availability and higher service levels .The problem is to achieve these goals within the financial constraints.

Building a maintenance culture : Till the Westwing fire at Pheonix substation the maintenance was reactive i.e. in response to the issues which occurred at the station. This approach has the flaw that it does not prevent any such incident in the future.

Automation of data: One more challenge lies in the form of integrating all transmission and substation condition data to facilitate the effective analysis and forecasting of the processes.

Pattern Analysis of data feeds: There was huge amount of data available but they lacked data mining capabilities to find patterns so as to identify actionable maintenance tasks.

Institutionalize the process transformation knowledge: The organisation lacked formal processes and was hugely dependent on people knowing who to get work done.

2. What are the requirements for creating a process-oriented culture in an organization? To what extent does Pinnacle West address these requirements? Where is it lacking?

Top Management Support :A transformation to a process focus to really take root in an organization, that change must develop support for itself through a “virtuous cycle” of achieving results augmented by an effective communication strategy and other support structures.

Pinnacle’s response in this regard: Pinnacle drove process changes from the top down. The Senior VPs fully supported the efforts. Every effort of the “Site Programs” received complete endorsement from the top management. This was considered one of the key parameters of their success.

Availability of Resources: For creating a process oriented organisation, resources in the form of people, finance, technology and equipments would be required initially. The initial investment in these resources would be a major factor for creating such culture in the organisation.

Pinnacle’s response in this regard: The professional development initiative of Pinnacle was geared towards acquiring skills and training necessary to embark on business process optimisation. This entailed incurring costs for making such trainings available.

Readiness for Change: For any organisation, the transformation of processes presents the biggest challenge in the form of resistance from its employees and prevailing culture. The measure of readiness for change, thus, becomes a significant factor in moving towards a process oriented culture.

Pinnacle’s response in this regard: Even before the Westwing fire incident happened, Atwell, director, operations and maintenance had always been a proponent of process orientation within the maintenance group. The fire incident accelerated the process changes and gave the momentum for implementing necessary changes.

Identification of KPI: Identification of KPI is necessary to determine if whether all these changes that were introduced, really result in achieving goal. Anything that can be measured can be imrpvoed. Thus identification of KPI is an important step

Pinnacle’s Approach: Pinnacle identified following KPI such as proportion of predictivework orders, average time of completion per work order, work completion to close out time, number of work orders opened/planned/scheduled/executed.

Benchmarking: Just adopting the process orientation and measuring does not guarantee that process is best optimized unless it is benchmarked with the industry where similar processes exists. Benchmarking helps determine what are the best practices that can be adopted to further improve the process.

Pinnacle’s Approach: With the help of CPE, the nuclear power plant was able to benchmark its processes against other nuclear power plant. This is the only example given in the case but as CPE is involved in overall process orientation of the organization it can be assumed that benchmarking was done in whole organization.