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By enabling members to share solutions born at the Group’s jobsites and industrial units, the Highlight Awards give rise to fresh new competitive advantages
written by: Humberto Werneck
photos by: Almir Bindilatti and Guilherme Afonso
It is a good thing that, last year, Fabio managed to take a break from his hectic daily schedule to write about what he and his colleagues have been doing at Unib-RS. He had a good incentive: the Highlight Awards, which Odebrecht introduced in 1992 to recognize and disseminate good ideas, and was extended to include Braskem in 2007. And because Fabio didn’t just take one break, but two, to produce a written record of his work, he was doubly rewarded this year. A total of 318 entries competed for the awards, sent from the 14 countries where Odebrecht is active. The Rio de Janeiro engineer’s delight and satisfaction at the festive awards ceremony held in Saúipe, Bahia, in December could be compared to his Bahian colleague Omar Pinto de Abreu. An Equipment Inspection Technician at the Basic Petrochemicals Unit in Bahia (UPB-BA), he had won before in 2007 and did it again in 2008. Another winner was Alexandre Castro, from Săo Paulo, who is also from Braskem. He came in second place in 2007 and garnered the first prize last year.
There were ten winners of the 2008 Highlight Awards, five from each company. Odebrecht Informa is featuring two of them in this article:
Knowledge Reuse – Braskem
Title: Delaying the Planned General Shutdown of Oleophins II at Unib-BA
Authors: Omar Pinto de Abreu, Francisco de Assis Eufrausino, Celsino Lima Filho, Hamilton Fernandes Franco, Faustino Reinaldo Rodriguez Armas and José Tito Sampaio de Andrade
During the routine operations of a plant that produces oil derivatives, every six years the time comes when the equipment must be shut down for a thorough inspection. These planned general shutdowns are highly complex and costly operations. Not only does production come to a halt for several weeks but thousands of temporary workers have to be hired. In the case of Central Feedstock Plant II (Cemap II) at the Basic Petrochemicals Unit in Bahia (UPB-BA), the next general shutdown was scheduled for January 2010.
However, thanks to a well-concatenated collective effort, the shutdown was put off until June. This was possible because UPB-BA has an In-House Equipment Inspection Service (SPIE), which, by law, allows up to 0.5% of its equipment to be past their inspection dates.
“We carried out a project involving all the plants at UPB-BA and managed to channel that 0.5% to the Oleophins II plant,” explains Equipment Inspection Technician Omar Pinto de Abreu. Delaying the general shutdown means that the company will stand to gain about BRL 20 million, adds Omar, a professional whose 2008 award made him a two-time champion, because he also won in 2007.
Productivity – Knowledge Generation
Title: Using Xbloc® and Xbase® artificial rock on the breakwater: Optimizing the Project’s Design and Timeframe
Authors: Mário Ricardo Monteiro Goulart and Keli Cristiane Corręa Goulart
It was already clear that this project – reclaiming approximately 250,000 sq-m of shore land in Panama City and building a road and a park there – would require large quantities of rocks. And that presented another challenge: there wasn’t enough rock at the available quarries, and transporting it to the jobsite would worsen the traffic jams in the area where the land was being reclaimed. Then the team members building the project came up with the idea of using artificial rock patented by DMC, a Dutch company: Xbase® (for the toe berm) and Xbloc® (for the 3,350-m breakwater’s protective cover layer). By the time the project is completed on May 28, about 21,000 of those artificial rocks made from rebarless concrete will have been put in place, according to engineer Mário Goulart, the officer Responsible for Engineering, who teamed up with his wife, geologist Keli Goulart, the officer Responsible for Quality to develop the idea. Odebrecht used 120 molds to make the units, and produced an average of 120 units per day.
Using Xbase® and Xbloc® to build the breakwater reduced the cost of the project by 13%. It also helped reduce the construction project’s local impact, because it eliminated the need for nearly 26,000 truck trips through Panama City.