Management – Arlington Valley Energy Facility
Using Microsoft SharePoint® to plan, collaborate, and organize
Arlington Valley Energy Facility
Owned by LS Power Group, Operated by NAES Corp570-MW, gas-fired, 2 × 1 combined cycle located in Arlington, Ariz
Plant manager: Greg Nugent
Key project participants: Ron Sager, production manager; Arlington Valley O&M staff
Challenge.
Many combined cycles are faced with minimal staffing and a majority of the personnel remain on rotating shifts. This creates an environment where word-of-mouth communications with all hands in a timely fashion is not possible because people are on different schedules.There also are several other information-management needs, such as: keeping plant written programs on the most current revisions, tight outage scheduling, and perpetual training coordination. If a plant is to adapt and thrive in this fast-paced environment, it must always be looking for ways to improve information flow, manage human capital, and create a collaborative team environment.
Solution.
The plant decided to utilize Microsoft SharePoint® (SP) as a tool to collaborate more effectively and in an efficient and cost-effective manner. The SP server application allows the end user to create customized intranet site architecture to fit the structure and needs of the organization. We chose to arrange the site into a main home page for all plant personnel and then create pages for each plant department. The following are some of the capabilities designed and implemented into Arlington Valley’s SP site:
1. Plant-wide information. The intranet home page is a voluntary start page for all site personnel. It has general content such as a site calendar, air-quality status, area news headlines, and announcements section (Fig 24). Each page has a links section containing useful sites: medical, dental, vision, and 401k employee benefits. There also are industry links—such as for CMMS, safety, users group forums, etc.
2. Scheduling:
- A site calendar on the home page has a schedule of major events, out-of-office notices, and on- duty shift assignments.
- Compliance event calendars for NERC and EH&S have been configured to allow for completion comments, current job status, allow for new tasks, recurrence and rescheduling of tasks, and allow tasks to be marked complete so the task is filed and is removed from view (Fig 25).
- An operations schedule allows for shift tasks to be assigned with just a few clicks. The tasks disappear from the list when complete and are archived with the tasks completion comments. There is an outage schedule that allows for a conventional calendar or Gantt charts.
- Calendars can be linked to Microsoft Outlook®, and can be overlaid with other calendars. Calendar events can be added and edited from Outlook® or an incoming email configuration can be configured to allow calendar events to be sent as attachments from email.
3. Document control. Document libraries containing procedures, policies, and standard forms require content approval, have automatic versioning control and recordkeeping, and have configurable workflows that allow automated procedure-change approval routing and documentation of change notification to the affected audience (Fig 26). Such an arrangement allows a procedure, for example, to be posted in its original file format but maintain document revision protection.
This allows the end user to check out and revise a document without any other users seeing the changes, while letting other users know the document is checked out. The document is checked in once the revision is completed. The document library then asks for revision comments which will be appended along with the revision in the permanent revision record. A configurable automatic-approval workflow then starts and routes the document sequentially to the appropriate management approvers (Fig 27). Once this is completed, it automatically approves the revision and is made available for viewing or printing by users. The approving manager can also initiate a workflow that gathers signatures of the affected audience. The configurable email within SP sends workflow emails based on a user-specified completion time frame until the task is completed.
4. Training. The need exists for various small training packages to be passed around for review. SP allows users to post PowerPoint® files, videos, or sound files and create a workflow to collect signatures as proof of training. Email routing of assignments and reminders are all automatic once the workflow is initiated.
5. Safety. The SP intranet site allowed us to create a home for plant interface with the safety committee. In this site, personnel can give safety suggestions and view the status of past suggestion action items. The site committee uses a calendar function to plan and track meetings.
Results.
While improvement results are mostly subjective, most personnel agree that the intranet site has made their jobs easier by:
- Making a “home base” where all master copies of procedures, checklists, and policies can be found.
- Creating a place where staff can verify their schedule at a glance and keep abreast of plant events.n
- Producing a way to manage documents while keeping them editable by the end user. This allows simple and efficient procedure change approval routing.
- Forming a way to document training on procedure changes and other events.
Reports show our site usage has increased over time as people became accustomed to it and realized its value. We found that amplified site use was also recognized when we added some general interest items such as current weather, news events, stock prices, and even a daily Dilbert cartoon.
