Considerations for Assessing Work Flow and Barriers during Construction, Maintenance, or Refurbishment for New Plants

Abstract

During any construction, maintenance, or refurbishment activity there are several factors that can impact the efficiency and hence the cost. Crew size, work planning, skill competency, resources, communication protocols, team interfaces, and others can all impact the performance of a given task. Ontario Tech University has been exploring work efficiency studies for the past several years and have developed several work processes that can be used to identify barriers to success. Wrench time, shift time, and work completion rates are considered as part of the assessment. In the past work, most of these barriers were identified during the work but the mitigation or removal of the barrier usually fell to subsequent work. What is needed is a more pro-active capability to identify barriers before they exist or identify fast response mitigations. In this work, we will identify the methods studied to date and the types of barriers that can easily impact work scope with some suggestions for exploring improvement in work performance. While the work study has been primarily on existing plants, the work presented here will include an examination of applying the techniques for small modular reactors.