Development and Implementation of the License to Operate System

Matamata Piako District Council (MPDC) operates a large number of water treatment and wastewater treatment plants. Following a review of operator training and competency assessment in early 2016, a number of issues were identified:

• Poor records of formal and informal operator training for specific plants;
• Incomplete, missing or out of date operating manuals;
• No clear plan to train and on-board new staff;
• No records of staff competency with respect to operating specific plants;
• Inconsistent practise between operators;
• Lack of resilience in the event of resignation or illness.

In order to address these issues, a project to develop site specific operator training and assessment was initiated. It is called License to Operate (LTO).

One of the key requirements was to develop a system that operators had easy access to via smartphones, tablets and PCs and thus a web based system was selected. The training material is largely video based with a focus on short clips of “how to do a task” and “how to respond to an event”. Operations and plant controls (SCADA) are covered and where possible the operators themselves are the ones “starring” in the videos.

There are many positives to video based training with the key benefits for us being ease of access, consistent messaging and it caters for different styles of learning. We think it is an innovative approach that supplements the old style of on-boarding new operators whereby they were buddied up with an old hand and “shown the ropes”.

LTO has four levels. The first qualifies a staff member to assist with plant operation under supervision. The second qualifies a staff member to operate the plant for short periods without supervision (e.g. callout cover). The third level is a plant expert, someone who understands all operations and key maintenance activities and is able to optimise the process; finally, the fourth level is someone who is qualified to assess the performance of others on the plant. To qualify for each level, a staff member has to complete the entire training material, pass some online tests and demonstrate competencies to an assessor.

The LTO scheme was initially piloted on the Matamata WTP and has since been rolled out across the organisation to cover all our larger water treatment plants. It is now being developed for our wastewater treatment plants.

Having developed a state of the art training system, our leadership group was faced with the challenge of making fundamental changes to ingrained behaviour. This paper will focus on the challenges and learnings from the implementation phase of the LTO system and will report on the measured benefits which have been realised.