Multidimensional Plant Management & Risk Assessment Methodology

• The execution of management philosophy.
• The employees' ability to share common tasks.
• The effectiveness of the organization.
• The soundness of plant and systems.

First, VAI determines the management philosophy in force at the site. For simplicity, we separate this into two distinct types:

Traditional Empowered

"It is important to recognize that this study makes no judgments as to the relative merits between Traditional and Empowered management philosophies or any degree of Progressiveness between, as many methods can be successful within the corporation's strategic objectives."

Failure to properly execute philosophy, as expressed through policy and by management's actions, causes delegation and employee performance problems. Such breakdowns usually result in equipment problems or failures. We determine if actual management behavior augments or contradicts management's stated philosophy. To properly verify that a healthy management philosophy is in force we assess six aspects of it:

Leadership	Organization
Work environment	Human resources
Delegation	Policies

Secondly VAI evaluates the plant's infrastructure to determine if it indeed supports or has problems with the execution of management's philosophy or its actions, as well as peer support. It is vital for employees to share certain responsibilities and in many cases, we know that plant operators depend on each other for their lives. To properly verify that healthy relationships exist among departments, functions, teams, peers, management and labor, we assess six aspects of these shared functions:

Communications	Legal
Finance	Quality controls
Taxation and depreciation	Insurance

Thirdly, VAI evaluates the organization itself. In this step, plant procedures, log books, production records, chemistry logs, OEM manual compliance, etc. are all evaluated to provide physical evidence of such support. We look for deficiencies and redundancies within an organization, thus giving us a sense for the organization's reliability. To properly verify successful long-term operations and validate that the mainstay of plant work is performed, we assess ten aspects of the organization's design:

General plant management	Engineering
Business management	Operations
Accounting	Planning & Scheduling
Energy & Fuels	Environmental
Maintenance management	Health and safety

Fourth, VAI performs a final check and balance. We technically evaluate individual plant systems, equipment conditions, supervisory control systems and their operability because we are looking for certain safety systems or devices. Evaluating plant systems' conditions gives us insights as to how effective the organization is, so we evaluate every system from five perspectives:

Reliability -- Redundancy -- Safety -- Protection -- Layout

Finally, we evaluate the unification of philosophy, shared functions, organizational design and the plant's condition and compare our findings for your plant with findings of the "best in class" practices of competitive organizations, so that we can make practical recommendations that will increase your competitive position.

Why 1,600 elements? Numerous equipment failures have been analyzed to determine the root cause. Of these failures, about 90% could have been avoided by making changes in management execution. The 1,600 elements have been derived to define individual management elements that can be assessed and remedied to prevent equipment failures.

Management Assessment Results:

Risk Assessment Results:

Based upon our analysis, VAI will determine how risk-adverse your business structure is and illustrate (via graph) any risk associated with management incongruencies as compared to a distribution of peer plants. Opportunities for the staff to increase future successful operations will be listed as action items for each of the players.