In 2002, American Ref-Fuel's Human Resources department implemented a company-wide Performance Management Program aimed at improving career development at all levels and identifying future company leaders. Increases training and retention of employees also mitigates the effects employee turnover can have on safety, environmental, and operations performance.
Maintenance of our facilities requires a coordinated effort among the Maintenance, Procurement, and Operations departments. We rely on good management practice and the expertise of our 200 maintenance employees and several hundred contractors to accomplish this work at a high level of quality. All maintenance efforts are designed to ensure the best availability of American Ref-Fuel's plants.
We continue to look for new ways to improve our corrective, preventive, and predictive maintenance practices in an effort to optimize our performance in these areas. While much of maintenance is reactive in response to plant situations and equipment issues, our biggest expenditures are for scheduled outage maintenance to ensure the long-term reliability of the plants. Planning and detailed scheduling are the keys to these multimillion-dollar efforts.
As the largest waste-to-energy provider in the northeastern United States, American Ref-Fuel has also identified efficiencies in its procurement of supplies and services to maintain our facilities. Exercising the leverage of a unified company benefits our relationships with vendors and controls costs.
