The Top 4 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Improve Your Next Outage

The Top 4 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Improve Your Next Outage

You just completed your outage. You are ordering pizza for the team and starting to get back to a normal shift schedule. As you’re getting back to business-as-usual, you are finishing up open items and making sure there are no issues with any of the units that were brought down for maintenance.

Now, it’s been a few weeks, a month after the units are all up and running and it’s time for the post-outage review. Capturing the performance of the overall outage, measuring the effectiveness of the strategy, benchmarking for maintenance and reliability comparisons, and updating the customers’ documentation are crucial to the success of future events and plant operations between them. If overruns occurred, the source of those overruns should have already been approved prior to execution but should be part of the review process as well. This will be fed into the lessons learned documentation.

If you work with an Emerson service center or Emerson Accredited Service Provider, the service provider will prepare a report for the entire outage from scheduling to the close-out portion of the outage. The report should contain every aspect of the outage and is used as an input to start planning the next event. These reviews should be a two-way review. One from the contractors to the plant site and one from the plant site to said contractors. From the contractor’s point of view, they must meet internally first and a formal KPI process should have been decided at the planning stage between customer and contractor to know how each fared.

 

Now let’s talk about four of the most important KPIs to track in your post-outage report:

 

1. Zero Safety Incidents

Protecting your most important assets, your employees, is key to the long-term success of your plant. The goal for everyday is zero safety incidents and that is no exception for your planned maintenance event. If there was a safety incident during the outage, the team should review why the incident occurred and how to take steps at the next outage to avoid any future safety incidents.

 

2. On-Time Schedule Completion

Maximizing your uptime to avoid an unplanned downtime is why you planned an outage. Ensuring that the outage was completed on-time, or even ahead of schedule should be tracked. For different assets, maintenance may have been finished sooner than others. Reviewing your previous outage can help you to understand and prioritize maintenance to meet the on-time schedule for the next outage.

 

3. Initial Scope Quote Remains In-Budget

Having an on-budget outage makes everyone happy. Upon closer inspection, the initial scope of what assets will be serviced may include scope growth when the outage occurs. Ideally you want to stay as close to the original quote as possible, but most outages have some scope growth especially when a valve is opened, and the unknown is found. There may be a need for extra parts, more in-depth repairs like machining, welding or even a possible installation of new valve or component will be needed. A customer should never be surprised at the end of an outage on costs. Those costs should have been approved and documented by asset so once the outage is over there is an approval trail for those extra costs.

 

4. Successful Startup with Zero Quality Issues

Even if your startup is on schedule and within budget, your ultimate success depends upon the craftsmanship and quality of work completed. Your Emerson service center or Emerson Accredited Service Provider employs specialized expertise and quality management skills as we pour over the hundreds of details that – if left undone – could jeopardize your results. Our certified technicians recognize the vital importance of a strong quality, health, safety, and environmental (QHSE) focus while in your plant. Startup and commissioning activities are performed using vetted safety protocols to help maintain a zero Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) throughout the project. Our specialists employ high safety standards to ensure that assets and personnel are protected, so your startup can be a complete success.

 

Are you looking for the right valve service provider? Check out Emerson’s service network, which includes Emerson service centers and Emerson Accredited Service Providers. Find your local service provider here.

 

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