During the recent past, the Operations Work Order System has been the subject of interest for some of our external partners and the general public.

The Environmental Office hired a first-ever dedicated person, Ananth “Sham” Vinjamuri, to track and manage environmental work orders. Under his charge, we successfully closed out/completed 2,547 work orders by identifying areas where minor projects could be completed using our in-house Asbestos-Team (A-Team) while assigning other work through our contracted environmental management vendors.

Additionally, we learned that approximately half of the existing work orders were associated with floor tile work. The typical procedure was to remove the floor tiles and then assign a different work order for the carpentry staff to reinstall new floor tiles. Given the number of work orders assigned to the carpentry team, we suggested a pilot program where our contractors would remove the damaged floor tiles and replace them with new floor tiles in the same mobilization, thus reducing the carpenter’s work order inventory. We now have outside contractors and our in-house A-Team performing these types of projects. We can remove and replace unsightly and damaged floor tiles in a shorter time and reduce work orders for Environmental and Carpentry.

This same approach is also being applied to insulation removal. Previously, an outside contractor would have been contracted to perform part of this work. Now, our A-Team does everything from removal through re-insulation, which frees up our contractors for other jobs.