Lessons Learned (LL)

Lessons Learned (LL) is knowledge or understanding gained by experiences that may be positive, as in a successful test or mission, or negative, as in a mishap or failure, or past incidents in current practices. A Lesson must be significant that has a real or assumed impact on operations; valid in factual and technical correctness; and applicable in identifies a specific design, process, or decision that reduces or eliminates the potential for failures and mishaps, or reinforces a positive result. Proved and validated Lessons Learned to be updated to the company plan and procedure.

Maui Fires: A Lesson For Utility Companies? (Source: Oil Price on 30 August 2023): In July, the big insurance companies raised prices roughly 50% on a worldwide basis, a reaction to the huge claims they had to pay recently. Not many people seemed to have noticed, at first. But insurance companies can’t operate without the backstop and off-loading of risk provided by the reinsurance companies. So expect the price of insurance policies to rise if not being canceled altogether. In August, deadly wildfires spread over the Hawaiian island of Maui. More than 100 people died. Did the actions or inactions of the local electric company contribute to the disaster? Had it invested enough to protect the grid? Had its operators made the right decisions to de-energize fire spreading transmission lines during the fire? What would internal documents show? Hawaiian Electric’s stock tanked 70% ($3 billion of wealth erased) as analysts opined on how much the company might have to ultimately pay out in damages to fire victims and their next of kin. The County of Maui filed a case against the utility, arguing that it made serious operational errors that contributed to the disaster. ... (Source: Oil Price)

Getting big mining projects right: Lessons from (and for) the industry: By Mark Kuvshinikov, Piotr Pikul, and Robert Samek - Mckinsey

More than four out of five mining projects come in late and over budget, by an average of 43 percent. One reason for the poor performance is that project leaders find it difficult to know whether and when to intervene. Although they almost always understand when a project is getting into trouble, they may hesitate to make changes because they hope that things will improve or worry that intervention will backfire—what if people get angry or feel too pressured and quit? These are legitimate concerns. In our experience, however, the biggest regret of leaders whose projects went wrong is that they waited too long to act and didn’t go far enough when they had a chance.

Lessons learned in commercial scale-up of new chemical processes (Jazayeri, B., Reacxion - HP October 2016)

Commercializing a new chemical process can be as simple as installing one or more homogenous batch reactor(s), or as complex as designing a fully integrated chemical complex requiring one or more heterogeneous reaction steps processing gas, liquid and/or solids, with other units required to prepare feeds, recover products/byproducts and recycle streams.