Power Plant Personnel:
The Outsourcing Option
(From Power Engineering Magazine, March 2010)

Read the full article here.

Irwin Industries is a leading industrial construction and maintenance company serving the power generation industry. Irwin's power plant services business unit primarily serves coal-fired generation, providing supervision and craft manpower for major boiler overhauls, from waterwall tube and header replacement to air quality management system installation.

Tube welders, because of their highly specialized skills — such as "buddy welding" and "mirror welding" — along with the great scrutiny paid to their work by authorized inspectors using x-ray, linear-phased array and other testing methods, are always in demand. Likewise, experienced project managers capable of successfully managing the stressful demands of overseeing safety, quality, schedule, budget, client relations and so on, are a rarity in the industry.

The company's two main approaches to developing key management and field staff are developing talent from within the company and committing to be the employer of choice through a combination of competitive wages and benefits, development and advancement opportunities and an engaged and supportive company culture.

Staffing projects with a sufficient number of qualified craft professionals — until recently, a great challenge for the industry — has eased over the past 24 months. As a result, previously skyrocketing wages have stabilized.

In recent years, ever larger scopes of work have been shoehorned into ever shrinking project schedules. This trend has necessitated a stronger focus on upfront planning and scheduling, development of more timely and effective project controls and the documentation and dissemination of lessons learned following each project.

"In our experience, power generation companies typically staff their facilities with employees who are highly knowledgeable about plant operations and day-to-day maintenance but may not have the experience or resources necessary to undertake a major boiler overhaul with a large scope of work and a tight schedule," said Adam LeVrier manager, marketing and communications.

Irwin crews are currently performing six large-scale outages at power plants across the U.S.

Read the full article here.

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