I am César Vega, an expert in Business Transformation, Operational Excellence and Automation, with 20 years in the energy sector.

We are in a moment in which cost reduction in all industries is a must, but you have to ensure that all of your actions don’t compromise the company’s sustainability, asset reliability and safety. Therefore, the improvement of people competencies -using world class methodologies and cutting edge technologies- is key to operational excellence.

Over the last 12 years, I have been working on an Eight Phase Model that I have recently named Symphony. Well, Symphony has Deming philosophy as its base. The model offers an innovative approach that links people competencies, methodologies and technology. I have had the opportunity to validate the model in three leading multinational companies with great results throughout the years. Now, I can say that operational costs can be substantially reduced with risk control and company sustainability. For instance, with our last road map to operational excellence, we successfully optimized the operations, increasing the production by 8%, reducing operational costs by 30%, modernizing all operations, as well as increasing all staff competencies with world class methods.

Let’s move on to the Eight Phase Model explanation. First, we prepare the asset strategic planning clearly defining the asset management vision which needs to be aligned to the company’s vision, strategies, long term and short term objectives. As you can see Phase 1 is very important because here we set the foundations of our journey.  Then, in Phase 2 we focus on critical points using Risk and Vulnerability Assessment (RAV) and Criticality Analysis. Phase 3 consist of reducing the ongoing losses with 5S (Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, Sustain) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA). Following the application of these tools, in Phase 4, all our activities and efforts aim at reducing potential losses, to this end we use Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). Having reached this point, we are ready to systematize our set of tasks and that is the objective of Phase 5: Systematization. At this stage we use Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), for example Maximo. After that, Phase 6 will focus on the design and preparation of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each stage of the process and the interpretation of measurements. I would like to highlight the importance of designing appropriate KPIs. Accordingly, systematic assessment of our progress is conducted. But that is not enough, we realize that future projections are also needed, so in phase 7, we carry out a life cycle cost analysis of core assets including our staff. Finally, Phase 8 deals with the development of mechanisms for continuous improvement, innovation and project management. The improvement phase organizes the sequence of innovation in every aspect of the company, to make sure we are doing the right thing at the right moment with the right resources.

To sum up, Symphony model reflects our holistic approach towards operational excellence using people competencies, world class methodologies and cutting edge technologies.