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Coking.com - Best Practices

A Best Practice is a practice/procedure/work process/equipment design that has been identified as being the best we know of and has been tested and validated most likely in more than one facility location. Examples might be a specification for purchase of a new coke drum or operation of a furnace.

"Best practices" start with someone's idea. Here's an approach for turning ideas into "best practices."

Collect and publish "good practices" which are the same type of things which have been identified and tried on one shift or at one location but may not apply to many other places, or may not be in place long enough to determine all the pluses and minuses. Some of these eventually become "best practices". If something is declared a "best practice", expect that all locations will eventually adopt and install/implement it. Keep a list of untested ideas and call them "good ideas".

Best practices, good practices, good ideas--this may seem a little confusing but keep a large idea pool and focus most of your effort on "best practices" and not the other 2 categories. 

Best practice teams in all parts of the refinery facilitate writing and adopting these best practices which management supports. Measure progress and completion regularly. Audit "best practices" regularly, maybe every 2 years. For example in the coker area, you may have 10 best practices and they have maybe 250 elements all total that you audit.

At the Coking.com Best Practices 2002 Seminar, Glenda Robertson of Shell Oil Products US Martinez Refining Company presented a "Process Outline for Best Practices for Operating Teams". You can view it here, or open a printer friendly Word document version.

View a Best Practices Charter for a meeting with refiners and vendors. See some of the Good Practices developed in the Breakout Groups at the 2002 Coking.com Seminar.

[2003 Seminar]