Site Personnel Index (SPI)*
Benchmarking Personnel Efficiency

What is it?

SPI is a proprietary tool for assessing personnel efficiency in manufacturing, it was developed in the mid-eighties and has been used in refineries, chemical and polymer production sites around the world. The output provides participants a measure of how efficiently they are operating by understanding how their manpower is being utilized. Productivity and other competitive measures alone do not present a complete picture of how efficiently a site is being operated. The site is assigned a complexity in SPI based on the installed equipment. The complexity is normalized and combined with the work hours used to operate, maintain and support the equipment. SPI provides a set of indices that are compared to relevant peer companies to identify areas for improvement.

What is the value to clients?

  • Development of Performance Quartiles and Benchmarks to highlight areas for performance improvement versus peers, when SPI is used over time is an indicator of improvement from year to year.
  • SPI can be used to assess efficiency of an overall site as well as for different business clusters on a site.
  • SPI can be used at different types of manufacturing sites independent of the capacity, size or products produced.
  • Provides a starting point for "Pacesetting Performance Programs", for providing a step change improvement in personnel efficiency.
  • Clients have access to highly experienced professionals with extensive databases.

How does it work?

For each site, the SPI analysis consists of three parts:

  1. All working hours in the manufacturing organization are collected and allocated into 22 skill groups.
  2. Translation of the site equipment into SPI building blocks to develop the complexity of the manufacturing facility. By adding up all the building blocks, the complexity count for a site can be established.
  3. A comparison of actual personnel used versus a peer group and a ranking of the relative performance to other participants in the study.

Activities are separated into standard and non-standard in order to properly compare efficiencies across sites. Standard activities are those that directly relate to Operations, Maintenance and Support of "bulk units" and are common to each location.

Non-standard hours for activities such as new construction, packaging, services to third parties, etc. are collected but no detailed comparisons are made.

Example of SPI Index compared to traditional productivity measurement

What should a participant expect?

An SPI study for a new participating site will take the following steps:

  • An initial site visit by a PTAI expert for a presentation of the program and training for site personnel
  • A focal point will coordinate and collect preliminary data.
  • A follow-up visit by PTAI will be done to verify personnel count and the complexity assessment
  • A presentation of the results will be made to management.

Conclusion

SPI is an excellent tool that allows companies to measure the efficiency of their manpower across sites of varying sizes, processes and business lines and compliments other productivity or competitive benchmarking tools by quantifying manpower utilization.

Other resources

Phillip Townsend Associates Inc.

523 North Sam Houston
Parkway East, Suite 500
Houston, Texas 77060

Phone: (281) 873-8733
Fax: (281) 872-4914
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