A Former Maintenance Manager with over 40 years of industrial maintenance experience, shares how the TRACK Platform helped improve his maintenance budget performance and daily management of contractors.

We spoke with Bruce Grissom, a former Maintenance Manager with over 40 years of maintenance experience at multiple oil & gas refineries, about his experience utilizing the TRACK Platform for his maintenance programs. He explained how using TRACK allowed him to improve his budget performance, ensure contracts were being adhered to, manage the crew ratios of his contractors on-site, and eliminate spend leakage. 

How did TRACK help to improve your budget performance? 

Bruce: If I go back about 8-10 years in my career, it’s like everyone else. I’m pretty sure it’s common across the industry, but the budgets were getting tighter and tighter. Every year I was asked to reduce my maintenance budget and spend. So I did like many others did; I went after productivity. If I could get more productivity, I could then squeeze more work out of the budget I had, and then I could reduce the headcount because I could get more work completed. That was kind of the traditional way of going after getting more out of your budget. 

Then, I went after the next thing I learned from my peers in the industry which was if you have a robust workflow process, you can then also squeeze some additional work out of your existing contractor workforce. This then allows you to look at reducing headcount again because the bottom line is for me to control my spend. It was all about the number of contractors I had onsite in the facility. In the facility I was at, I averaged on any given day about 500 contract workforce that I was responsible for day in and day out. That did not include turnarounds. During turnarounds, we’d peak at about 2500. I used it every day of the year to get the most out of my budget that I could.

To give you an example, I took a 31% productivity rate and got up to about 50%. I took a workflow process from zero, developed it, and got that as strong as I could. I still needed to be able to get more work done. I was still being asked to reduce my budget. 

So, I was in a room one day, and TRACK was coming into a facility to run a turnaround. I saw what they did for that turnaround, and I said, “you know, I could do this on my side, too.” So, I went after TRACK. I put TRACK in for the routine day-to-day business. I then felt comfortable that I was getting every moment of work I could get from the contracted workforce that I had onsite. As a result, I was able to continue to reduce my budget overall. Certainly, I was being asked to do that by senior management, but every year I was able to hit my reduction targets, even with inflation going up. I could not have done that without TRACK helping me manage and only pay what I owe the vendors. And you’ll see the realization was we were overpaying our vendors a considerable amount. That’s how I went after improving my overall budget performance and maintenance in an environment where we were constantly reducing. And we’re constantly reducing today given what’s happening in the oil industry.  

 View common industry overbilling examples>>

What were the biggest benefits that TRACK brought to your maintenance programs? 

Bruce: It was amazing the deeper I dove into this to see and understand how little my team understood about what was in the contract that purchasing had put together. My supervisor was signing timesheets that were going into a manual process and being approved had no clue as to what a consumable item was. They had no clue how many pieces of equipment that vendor, trucks, welding machines, that kind of thing that was in the contract; they didn’t know any of the details that were in the contract. And it was amazing, once we got into TRACK, how little I realized that they knew. With TRACK, it allowed me to take that burden off the people that were in the field whose focus was executing work. Their job was to get the work done, make sure it was done safely, and then make sure it was done efficiently based on the information I shared with you earlier about the workflow and time on tools. 

What TRACK did is offload all of the responsibilities from the field personnel, because they felt confident and I felt confident that all of the terms and conditions that were in the contract, in the PO’s, were being applied automatically when TRACK was in place. I also paired with our purchasing group at this point once I realized just how little control I had pre-TRACK. We partnered up to tighten up the contractual terms even tighter which then translated into more controls from the TRACK side allowing my budget to go even further.  

How did the data from TRACK help you proactively manage maintenance activities and your contractors? 

Bruce: A few things helped me tremendously. One was skills. On the Gulf Coast, we were always challenged to find skilled craftspeople. The vendors were challenged to provide skilled craftspeople. I remember sitting down on more than one occasion and negotiating the ratio between first-class (or journeymen-type level) and helper class. Pre-TRACK, I couldn’t see that. I had to depend on what the vendor was telling me was the skillset of that individual, and it was a constant battle. At least on the Gulf Coast, the group of people with that skill set was getting smaller and smaller. With TRACK, I could now look at the skills every day, and I could put some flags when the skill level 1 versus the skill level 4 ratio began to get out of proportion. I could sit down with the vendors and say, “you agreed to this particular ratio.” That’s how I got the most productivity, which helped me tremendously along that side.

The other thing was what I found out also pre-TRACK was at the beginning the relationship my supervisors had with the vendors was just too close. Too much of a buddy-buddy type environment. Too often I would have supervisors approving people to go out to the parking lot and get tools, for example, or leave early to go pick up lunch or run errands that were not in the contract. So with TRACK, I would always look at this thing we call Overrides. Anything that conflicts with the terms and conditions within the contract, comes through the system via an Override. Well, I would look at the Overrides, who was approving them, and what were their reasons for those approvals. It allowed me to sit down and coach my staff and make them more aware of what they were doing when they approved. I was able to basically drive those Overrides to a low number. They never go away because the vendors are constantly submitting for things that are not covered under the contract. So we constantly coached and trained our guys to limit those Overrides. When the Override comes in, you must know as a field approver that the Override is legitimate. 

So, it helped me train my guys on why and how often those were coming through. And those were kind of the three big areas for me. The big difference once TRACK was implemented. 

Maintenance Managers are constantly needing to tighten budgets, streamline processes, and improve productivity on site. 

The TRACK Platform manages all of your contractor labor, equipment, and materials terms, conditions, rates, and schedules so that you stay on top of your maintenance budget. TRACK accurately monitors and reports on your daily allocation and settlement and delivers vital analytics on metrics for your maintenance performance.

Key Benefits for Maintenance: