MTS Indonesia participated as a guest during EPRI Plant Reliability Optimization (PRO) user group meeting, which was held on June 19 to 23, 2006 at Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, Nashville, Tennessee. The venue was attended by participants from benchmarked power plant such as DTE Energy, Ameren Corporation, Tennessee Valley Authority, and American Electric Power. This year’s meeting highlights was vertical integration of PRO/PMO (Plant Maintenance Optimization) /MOP (Maintenance Optimization Program) implementation. Participants are presenting their challenges and success stories in their asset optimization effort. All presenters agreed that reliability is indeed a corporate strategic goal. They showed that a successful asset reliability improvement must become an integral part of corporate strategy, therefore this year meeting was special since not only PRO/PMO/MOP coordinators are giving the presentation, but also representatives from corporate Vice Presidents, Corporate PRO Coordinators, Plant Management, Technology Owners and System Engineers.

During the opening event, Mr. Leonard Loflin from EPRI Solutions briefed the participants on several current key issues in US power generating industries. First point was, even US power generations are producing power locally, they still highly influenced by global changes. For example, currently China are expanding their generating capacity. Therefore they will absorb coal from Australia and South Africa, which made UK and the rest of European countries had to draw coal from east coast of USA and Virginia. At the end, the US local price of coal will be affected and it will add cost for US power producer. Other point highlighted by Mr. Loflin was the age profiles of US power generating industries workers. In 2003, a research revealed that majority workers were in the range of 45 – 55 years old. Which means current 2006 profiles would be in the range of 48 – 58 years old. This raised concern would be the fact that US Power Generations are loosing their expertise, they will have to work with fewer hands, they will have to be able to cope with increasing workloads and responsibility. Because of those threats, the obvious compensating actions would be to replace the individual knowledge with corporate knowledge. Instead of depending on individual knowledge, power industry must depend on the structural information which is available within the system. Secondly is to concentrate only in critical task. Therefore criticality would be the base on determining which action should be chosen. Thirdly is to develop “hot links” with external supports.

In view of the above facts, the asset improvement initiatives have become a “must have” in order to cope with these challenges. Therefore programs such as PRO, PMO or MOP have been accepted as the top corporate programs. Additionally, without a good alignment between corporate strategy and asset optimization, it would be very difficult to achieve success and maintain continuous improvement over a long period.

To support these optimization efforts, EPRI has developed strong knowledge based support for the power industry. The result of more than 20 years of collaborative research within EPRI members has been properly documented and administered. Furthermore, EPRI has the ability to provide the best consultants available to help power industries absorb and utilize the EPRI knowledge and transform them into corporate embedded knowledge. With the power of current information infrastructure, it is relatively easy for an on-site technician to reach corporate support engineer or even manufacturer supporting engineer and third party consultant to get instant decision on a problem.

- HPW [04-07-2006 15:22:04] -