The Pantex Plant has underreported its maintenance backlog by 69 percent despite properly identifying the condition of its infrastructure, the Department of Energy Inspector General’s Office (IG) said in a report Tuesday.
Pantex reported 4,002 backlogged tasks as of Jan. 19, 2015, it said. However, the IG’s review of the system the plant uses to manage maintenance work requests found that Pantex omitted 8,714 other maintenance tasks.
The majority of requested maintenance tasks at the plant, then, were not reported to National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) management through the performance metric reporting, the report said, which means “NNSA management does not have a true indicator of the site infrastructure’s overall condition.”
Pantex officials attributed the backlog to reduced maintenance budgets. “Pantex required $228.9 million to fund infrastructure in fiscal year 2015, but NNSA funded only $133.3 million,” the report said.
Tasks considered important to safety that went unreported in the backlog included the repair of roof ladders and installation of lockable gates, with a scheduled start date of Sept. 8, 2014, the IG said. The tasks, intended for a mission-critical facility to block roof access during radiography work, had not been started or reported in the maintenance backlog as of Jan. 19, 2015, it said, noting that “administrative controls” such as a physical barrier and signage were instead used to restrict access to the roof.
The IG discovered that Pantex only reported maintenance tasks in the backlog if the task was in “Ready” or “Working” status – meaning the task was either approved or had already begun – and if the hours spent on incomplete tasks did not exceed the hours that had been estimated for completion.
This means that if a certain number of hours had been expended on a task equal to or greater than the estimated hours, the task would not be reported on the backlog despite being incomplete. Work order statuses omitted by these practices include the categories “Initial,” when the work order is created; “Plan,” when management reviews and assigns tasks; and “Hold,” meaning the task must be rescheduled.
Pantex failed to report 5,463 maintenance tasks that fell under these work statuses – 61 percent of which were older than one year – and 3,251 incomplete tasks that fell outside of the accounting method for hours expended, the report said.
Still, the IG acknowledged that Pantex “properly identified and disclosed the overall condition of its infrastructure” and established priorities to maintain capabilities and recapitalize aging facilities and systems.
It recommended that NNSA Production Office (NPO) management ensure Pantex managing and operating contractor Consolidated Nuclear Security (CNS) “modifies the definition and measuring of maintenance backlog at Pantex to include requested maintenance, both planned and unplanned tasks,” and offer oversight to ensure the plant accurately reports its maintenance backlogs.
NPO management concurred, noting that it has revised its definition of backlog but claiming the backlog was not underreported. “[W]hile certain maintenance-related data was not a part of the primary metrics at the time of the audit, NNSA was fully aware of the additional data, and it was available for consideration as appropriate in all planning and funding decisions,” it said.
CNS developed metrics for both of its sites to report, the IG said. “The new metrics suite includes the maintenance backlog, and the data set feeding the metric at Pantex was revised to include all maintenance requested, regardless of planning status,” it said, noting that management considers the recommendation on the definition and measure of the backlog to be closed.
Management also noted that NNSA has implemented a new government-owned system, BUILDER, which is meant to “provide greater consistency and transparency on infrastructure management” and will be fully implemented in 2018. The system is meant to help facility managers track maintenance and conditions at facilities at all NNSA sites.
In May NNSA announced it had successfully populated all building inventory and condition information into the BUILDER system. Pantex announced last July that CNS’s goal by 2018 is to “complete data loading on the total 345 facilities at Y12 as well as 620 at Pantex, then implementing the program to plan maintenance and repair projects.”
