Coming off a beneficial 2018 and Spring 2019 outage season, the USA/STARS Personnel Sharing Team met in San Antonio during the USA Executive Summit to develop the 2020 personnel sharing plan. The team typically meets after the spring outage season to negotiate the following calendar year’s plan. Although not finalized, the USA/STARS plants that participate in the Personnel Sharing Team Program plan to share approximately 70 employees in 2020. Employees will be loaned/borrowed between the stations. This level of resource sharing is made possible through each station’s membership in the two participating alliances.
Theresa Neidhold of Columbia Station, team leader for the Personnel Sharing Team, stated that members were well-prepared for the meeting and came with the number of represented and non-represented people and classifications each site was prepared to loan and desired to borrow. During this year’s meeting, the team also heard a presentation regarding the expected industry-wide Radiation Protection Technician shortage in 2020. The industry’s primary providers of Radiation Protection staffing resources forecast a shortage of resources during the Spring 2020 outage season because of the 34 scheduled industry outages. Additional challenges include decommissioning activities that will further reduce the outage pool and technician attrition due to limited job opportunities during the Fall 2019 outage season.
The team also had an update from Tim Scoggins, Manager of the USA Valve Program, regarding the potential for the Personnel Sharing team to add Valve Technicians to the list of personnel shared between the stations. No action was taken as a result of the presentation, but the topic will be further discussed on future Personnel Sharing Team calls.
The program is a great opportunity for both the stations and the individuals who have had the opportunity to participate. As borrowed and loaned employees are placed into positions at other plants, they are given the ability to gain insight by evaluating how processes compare to those carried out at their home station. In addition, receiving stations can learn and make improvements by leveraging the expertise of these experienced nuclear employees.
With the need to continuously improve outage performance, sharing personnel between plants saves time and money and will continue to be an important aspect of the path to excellence. The USA/STARS Personnel Sharing Program allows plants to coordinate sharing personnel for outages and emergent needs, while creating strong partnerships with other utilities. Sharing employees who are continuously exposed to the same industry elements on a routine basis – nuclear safety considerations, operating experience, ongoing training and daily work experiences – makes these workers very close to ‘turn-key’ when they arrive on a site.
From a financial perspective, the benefits are win-win-win. Not only do the loaning and borrowing stations win, but the loaned employee does, too. They get new experiences and share Operating Experience (OE) with the borrowing station and they also have the opportunity to increase their income by being in the borrowing plant’s outage. The cost to the stations is the actual cost of the employee which is reimbursed via invoicing from the loaning station to the receiving station. As a guideline, the stations report that each loaned USA/STARS employee eliminates the need for up to two supplemental workers. The employee walks in knowing the industry standards they must adhere to and much of the in-processing rigor is reduced or eliminated.
For the loaning station, the benefits are very interesting and frequently not totally understood by some members of the station’s staff outside of the human resources department. The loaning station saves, in O&M costs, the total amount of the invoiced cost for the loaned employees. Looking at that benefit in more detail: during the operating cycle of a plant, there are times of low productivity in virtually every department. When a station plans carefully to loan employees during these times, the amount of low productive work-hours is significantly reduced. To put the financial benefit in better focus, in 2019 the USA plants alone reported a savings of $3,011,918.90. This does not include the savings reported by the STARS plants.
There are other untapped benefits that are being evaluated. How many times do the plants have to scramble to get valve experts to assist with an emergent problem? The needed expertise is at another USA/STARS station, just a phone call away!
Subsequent to the meeting, the Team received word from Fermi expressing their interest to reengage with the team, this is great news as it will open additional opportunities for all the participating plants.