Our sites are fast-paced. Our work is deadline-driven. The momentum is always moving us forward to the next task and the next deliverable. So it’s not always easy to stop and take a step back — especially when it may mean switching gears and embracing new ways to work. But in a challenging economic climate with so much uncertainty clouding the near future, that pause is exactly the type of proactive move we need.

That was the mentality our teams across Monument sites embraced when low inventory and a soft market raised some red flags in our current spending and operations. It was time to slow down and make some tough decisions — but the efforts and challenges would all be worth it.

“In operations, we want to keep moving 24/7 and that often means wanting to try to fix things right away,” Wendell Borges, Site Leader at Brandenburg, explained. “But quickly calling the first available contractor isn’t always the most cost-efficient way to go about things. We needed a more structured process in place across all of our sites, as well as a budget that everyone agrees to follow. With today’s economic forecast, it really puts the pressure on us to reduce and control these costs. So it became our top priority to create that internal alignment by exploring all the areas within our operations where we could be more cost-effective.”

The key was putting a team together that was fully aligned on the overall goal. They established clear objectives and an agreed-upon, target-budget based on their research and made sure everyone was on the same page.

This cross-location team started with the biggest cost drivers. They explored the equipment rentals, worker agreements, and repair expenses associated with contracted accounts, as well as the processes associated with each.

“With the current market slowing things down a bit, we realized we had a little more flexibility in our scheduling which would help us reduce our equipment rentals and overtime hours across sites,” Maria Kraemer, Houston Area Supply Chain & Manufacturing Leader, explained. “We analyzed areas where we may have ramped up our own inventory during busier times and tested our ability to still perform effectively with less. And since here in Houston, we have multiple locations within close proximity, we explored how we could leverage shared resources. While each site has their own priorities, we also have a lot of common ground from which we could make these decisions.”

Visibility was a major component in the execution.

“Our goal was to get these expenses into the right categories to help us be more cost-disciplined,” Wendell shared. “We were checking with our teams every 5-10 days to understand how our operations were performing, keep a pulse on the numbers, and understand where we needed to adjust. In production, it’s easy to blur the lines between investment and maintenance, but this system is helping hold everyone accountable for every expense in relation to their appropriate category — which will help us significantly in the long run.”

But there’s also been some short-term achievements already having an impact across Monument plants. These wins include:

• More effectively managing waste on-site to eliminate unnecessary expenses associated with transport and removal.
• Leveraging resources / contractors between all the Houston plants by condensing multiple agreements into one specific contract.
• Minimizing equipment rental by determining which utilities are needed 24/7 versus which can be called in when a task requires it.
• Managing mechanical integrity more proactively. The team evaluated over 500 pieces of equipment to prioritize each based on rankings of safety and failure modes with the goal of establishing a very strong discipline on how to approach this moving forward, creating clear budgets, and delivering on our commitments
• Improving equipment reliability, reducing costly frequent failures. For example, the Brandenburg team has already reduced some vacuum pump breakdowns from a 3-month occurrence to a year+ through this exercise, while also increasing the site’s average mechanical pump seal life from about 2.5 years to 9+ years.

And the best is yet to come!

“We’re managing and controlling costs much more effectively than ever before across all of our facilities,” Manu Gyselinck, Site Leader at Monument Kallo, shared. “The interactions between the people in the plants and our financial departments are much more open and consistent as everyone is now driven by understanding of our cost drivers and how they can be optimized. Even when the finance team isn’t on site here at Kallo, the operations team is talking about costs — and we’re seeing this everywhere. This focus is now more embedded in the organization and will continue to have a major impact on our processes moving forward.”