Layoffs are unfortunate for employees and their families. With more than 95% capital and expense work being cancelled or delayed, where is all the work that our employees would supposedly be doing? It makes absolutely no sense to keep so many layers of supervisors, managers, engineers, planners when the majority of them don't add real value to the company. I have seen most of them are very counterproductive as they try to justify their jobs. Some of them simply play politics every day. The focus is to improve reliability and efficiency (optimization) at manufacturing sites.
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It depends. Just because contract labor is cheaper per hour doesn't mean they are cheaper for a job if every aspect is more inefficienct.
Also low margin environment does mean a lower overall cost to shutdown equipment, but again, would need to look at the direct costs associated with it.
In the pandemic environment, more contract labor runs the risk of spread of the virus to operating parts of the plant. Which could cause additional issues / bad PR.
Not sure a blanket statement is warrented in the current environment without evaluation.
Actually now is a good time to do T/A work. The opportunity cost of lost production is very low. And contractors are desperately looking for work and will be very competitive on price. If you can afford it, get it done and out of the way for when margins improve. And they will improve. Capacity will come off line until a sustainable margin is achieved. It takes a little time, but the solution to low margins is low margins.
Sorry to say, but Baytown is the epitomy of exxon culture which has many redundant positions that just are not required.
@vlv opposite is happening in Baytown. Operation and key engineering roles got eliminated, which can not be replaced by HQ business planners. T/A's that are planned for 2021/2022 got pushed. Most of the T/A projects got canceled. We did get a new middle manager from HQ but have to do an additional 60 minutes of LPSA with this person every day.
I know some brown nosers that are mediocre at their work but just wanted to manage people.. got promoted due to all the hard work brown nosing and spent lots of time playing politics now.. if EM wants to be competitive again.. these managers will need to be purge from the system..
This is exactly why there are headcount reductions.. Many of these jobs are going to come out of the projects organizations. Any "manufacturing" jobs lost can easily be replaced by other engineers in spring that are out of work. We really don't have a shortage of employees.. Just inefficient work processes that chew up employee time for little to no benefit.
From what I have heard TMTS described as from site management, it will be taking the lower value work the site engineers are doing and moving that work responsibility overseas in order to free up more work locally. i.e. providing process data, data entry, etc. The discussion was not surrounding mass layoff of site engineers. HW3 will be interesting in what it produces.
Pushing out TA in the middle of a pandemic makes absolute business sense. Contract labor and time inefficiencies are going to result in much higher TA costs. Pushing out TA in "normal" years is just an evaluation of costs vs margin/risk reduction. Not sure how either of those "significantly impacts the bottom line unless done for the wrong reasons"
I was an experienced hire and worked for another big chemical company. I was surprised that EM had 3 people for the same roles and responsibilities I had with the other company. I also have 3 more bosses to report to and 3 times more meetings every week. The interesting part was that I quickly got used to the EM culture and blended myself in.
It seems like the initial “work study” is based on insubordination, tardiness and key strokes...
Cutting people at manufacturing facilities, delaying T/A's, and moving technical jobs overseas (e.g. KLTC) will hurt the bottom line long term. These are not sustainable business strategies.