A Conversation with Keileigh Bennett

Keileigh Bennett lived and worked many places before coming to Berkeley Labs in November 2019. Born in Mississippi, her father’s Air Force career meant moving a lot as a child.

As an adult, she was working as an engineering supervisor for UPS when a neighbor suggested she come work for what became the first of several national labs. Her role as the Facilities Operations Department Head allows Keileigh to bring several years of national labs operations experience to a team that touches every building and system in the Lab.

What is your area of work?

I’m the Facilities Operations Department Head. That means that I’m a part of the team that handles the day to day running of all facilities. The Facilities Operations team is also responsible for coordinating and scheduling preventative and predictive maintenance, as well as corrective maintenance. The team consists of 33 people, from the Utilities Outage Portfolio Manager, to the Facility Area Managers (FAMs), work planners, a buyer, and a material specialist.

What big challenge(s) are you hoping to solve with your work in Facilities in the next 20 years?

Our biggest challenge is updating our facilities in a manner that would allow Berkeley Lab to continue to meet complex scientific needs. Science is going to change, and we in Facilities have to be able to change with it and be agile enough to be cutting edge. I want people to know how important Facilities can be to the research community. Our science is outstanding, and I want our facilities to be outstanding, and our Facilities team to be seen as true partners in ensuring we remain a world class institution.

What steps are you taking today to accomplish this vision?

Right now we’re establishing priorities and assessing how we (Facilities) are structured. Next is restructuring to be able to respond faster. But I have bigger plans. My team is partnering with Facilities Engineering and looking at smart tech - basically artificial intelligence - for predictive maintenance modeling, which will allow us to be much more proactive instead of reactive. The goal is to become more efficient internally and also be more responsive to our customers.

Who would you like to partner with at the Lab to bring this vision to life?

I am a big proponent of partnering with the science community to understand their needs so that Facilities can be prepared with the resources needed to meet those needs. If we know more about what researchers need and what they are thinking, we can be more agile and flexible and the researchers get what they want faster. As an example, if the FAMs are better integrated into the science programs, and the researchers talk to them about what future needs and ideas they have, the FAMs can partner with them to ensure the right resources are available when the researcher needs new equipment installed.

I want to partner with procurement and with the science and operations leadership to set up processes that allow my team to better understand and predict needs.

Who from the past, present, or future would you like to collaborate with? And on what?

If given the opportunity I would work with Kiichiro Toyoda, who in concert with his father helped to create the Toyota Way. The concept is built on two pillars:

• Continuous Improvement, which takes in the concepts of Challenge, Kaizen (change for the better) and Genchi Genbutsu (observing at the source)

• Respect for People, which embraces Respect and Teamwork.

Bringing these concepts into the Lab would help to continue promoting a culture of collaboration, ownership and efficiency.