Superlative efforts garner President's Awards

nergy Systems and ORNL presented new President's Awards for Continuous Improvement on February 26. The awards recognize employees and teams for their efforts in making the two companies more efficient and better places to work. Following are brief descriptions of the honorees' hard work and accomplishments.

ORNL

Over the years, ORNL Occurrence Reporting Program Manager Jeff Long has developed procedures and guidance that ensure Lab compliance. Jeff and his group have dramatically increased the percentage of reports accepted by DOE, made occurrence reporting more user friendly and eliminated wasted effort.
John Mashburn took on the challenge of making ESH&Q a "paperless" operation. He designed a Web-based system architecture, developed the links to make the system work, led the creation of "necessary and sufficient" guidance documents and acted as mediator to resolve disputed issues. His system accommodates either the first-time novice or the experienced professional.
The Lab's Plant and Equipment Division established a taxi service to deal with a shortage of transportation for its workers. The work of P&E's Transportation team—Cheryl Childress, Pat Ledford, Richy Willett and Allen Winton—has resulted in an average P&E response time of less than three minutes.
Bruce Johnston provided Real Audio/Video for the Interlab '97 Conference for Webmasters at national laboratories, hosted by ORNL. Bruce recognized the wide applicability of Real Audio/Video to broadcasting information both within ORNL and among counterparts in the R&D community, as well as its archival potential, and successfully demonstrated the potential of Internet broadcast technology.
Five alkali-metal facilities maintained in a standby status, in some cases for decades, incurred continuing surveillance costs. Many knowledgeable staff had left, and the potential for an incident was believed to be ever increasing. Uri Gat developed a plan to remove the facilities while Randy Burnett, Bob Ihle, John Mayo and Richard Montgomery worked with vendors. With the first phase complete, costs are down. Demonstration projects are expected to be less costly by a factor of three or more.

Energy Systems

At the Y-12 Plant, more than 50 individual emission source permit applications have been replaced by one major source operating permit application. A team of eight—Laura Cunningham, Jim Eaton, Duke Rowan, Gary Seeber, Johnny Skinner, Susan Spencer, Charles Washington and Jack Zanger3coordinated the production of multiple permit application packages into a single deliverable, six weeks ahead of schedule.
A team to improve Product Certification's conduct of operations self-assessment process at Y-12 has been praised by DOE as "an excellent model for other organizations." Among the suggestions made by Randy McCloskey, Jim Milligan, John Mincy, Don Newman, Jim Norvell and Jane Truett was the relocation of a rad boundary so that an inspector working alone is now visible at all times.
Benefit Plans' Mike Moore developed an investment education seminar for employees and their spouses who participate in the savings program. More than 1,000 have attended since the program began, and it's working. Today about 55 percent of the Savings Program assets are invested in the Stable Value Fund, compared with nearly 80 percent two years ago.
The in-house disposition of potentially contaminated vehicles and heavy equipment at Y-12 was costly and time-consuming. J. D. Huddleston, Charles Noe, Bob Robinson, Jim Woodward and Robert Campbell implemented an innovative approach that reduced the disposal timeline from seven years to 60 days. More than 576 tons of surplus contaminated equipment have been disposed.
Sharon Eason and Mary Sadler benchmarked travel operations at other government contractors and discovered that several laboratories had saved significant sums by eliminating the GSA travel rate requirements and adopting reimbursement processes for "actual and reasonable" travel expenses. A change implemented in March 1997 has saved Energy Systems and ORNL a projected $900,000.
Data about telecommunications services—about 21,000 phones and circuits and hundreds of other pieces of equipment—are maintained in several databases by several different organizations. Changes made by Pamela Cotham, Krista Little, Kathy Perry, Brad White, Beeb Benson, Jerry Harp, Marcia King and Debra White have resulted in a more flexible cost distribution system that has lower maintenance requirements, is less expensive and is faster to run. Cost savings are expected to exceed $107,000 in FY 1998.
Recently, requests for Analytical Service's Wet Chemistry Lab analyses from Y-12 and ORNL were added to Linda Barkley's existing workload from ETTP. Linda found ways to streamline her workload while maintaining regulatory compliance. Linda has used her computer skills to implement programs that reduce the possibility of human errors in generating data.
The Engineering Subcontract organization's transition to the new Cost Reimbursement Contract system has resulted in an overall improvement in the control and management of engineering subcontracts. The work of Ruth Tuft, Dianne Alford and Gordon Child required constant communication, patience and mutual respect as they learned the new system, identified bugs, found solutions and then helped implement them for their customers.
The Protective Service Organization's Central Alarm System is a very complex monitoring system with more than 30 computers, thousands of sensors and 100,000 lines of computer code. Failures can result in plant lockdowns. Steve Blasingame is a member of the CAS call-in list of people who must respond to any calls for assistance with CAS. Steve's responses during two holiday weekends helped avert CAS-induced plant productivity losses.
Cathryn Nook, Betty Robinette and Lola Roseberry led the effort of dozens of documents, record and information people to reengineer their processes. Their changes that have reaped Columbus Initiative cost savings of more than $800,000 for FY 1998 and an expected $2 million next year.
Jim Edwards, Sara Jordan, Bill Kimmerly and Kathy Smith took on the challenge to make changes in information infrastructure systems, services and cost tracking that have saved about $8 million and helped position Energy Systems to provide these services and resources to other Oak Ridge contractors.
Jim Stewart and Gary Hilton have lent their business management support to Information Technology Services in overseeing the complex series of cost and service centers that support the information infrastructure. Jim and Gary also fit all of the financial analyses associated with the proposal for the new services company in with their normal duties and never missed a beat.
At Paducah, Don White tracked action items to ensure their appropriate disposition, which had become an issue within the Environmental Management organization. He designed and implemented a database that enables EM staff to track action items to be sure they are not lost on someone's desk.
Hobert Hill, Energy Systems' transportation manager at Portsmouth, found ways to improve the transportation process that resulted in FY 1997 shipment goals to be met as well as those of the waste characterization program and other subprograms that require off-site shipment of hazardous and nonhazardous materials.
In September 1997 a ruptured drum was found inside a waste storage facility at Paducah. It contained nitric acid contaminated with Tc-99 and TRU waste. The responding HAZMAT team assessed safety hazards, stabilized the spill and worked with the DOE investigators. Through their efforts, all similar waste was treated and stabilized and changes were made in Paducah's waste management program to prevent a recurrence. The HAZMAT team members are Jan Buckmaster, Jerome Ellington, Becky Forsee, Jeff Garner, Ashton Haus, David Hayden, Martin Hughes, Dickie Kuehn, Sam Leone, Steve Meiners, Tom Shadoan, Bill Taylor, Mike Zeiss, Ricky Keeling and Michele Steinbeck. —B.C.