Last week’s Petrochemical Engineering & Construction and Gulf Coast Shutdowns & Turnarounds conferences took place in New Orleans. Here are excepts from the full posts over on the Top Quartile Performance site.
As process manufacturing and production capital projects continue to grow in scale and complexity, more and more companies have to ask: What happens when best practices aren’t good enough?
Project complexity has only increased with global teams, locations and supplies, Nyquist said—but current best practices were never designed to address these factors. Companies like Emerson have worked diligently in recent years to find new solutions. Emerging technologies, such as virtualization, have enabled companies to address issues earlier in the project to reduce risks from back-loaded activities.
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Turnarounds hold a natural paradox: How can downtime be among the most intense periods for a busy plant?
Managing the scope of turnarounds is critical to getting the work done and staying on schedule. Emerson’s Nikki Bishop (right) offered her expertise as an “Effective Plant Turnaround Scope Management” panelist at the Gulf Coast Shutdown and Turnarounds conference in New Orleans on June 8.
Bishop was joined by turnaround leaders from owner companies on a panel focused on full project controls alignment, proven best practices for aligning objectives and avoiding “scope creep,” and mitigating overruns risks.
Significant work is put into process manufacturer and producer capital projects: But how ready is the project team to transition the project to operations after the commissioning and startup phase ends?
The panel, “Operational Readiness: Turnover of Project and Commissioning Start-up,” focused on best practices and valuable lessons learned in ensuring quality, reliability and efficiency during the Commission and Startup process. Industry owners and contractors also shared insight on delivering capital projects effectively and emphasized the need for a sound process for turnover from the contractor to the owner, to ensure that the project meets schedule and cost objectives as a project nears completion.
Sarnataro, an Emerson program manager who leads mega-project execution for the Sasol Lake Charles Cracker Project, noted that process control systems and instrumentation are typically considered at the end of a capital project—and yet have a major input on the schedule. Finding ways to optimize the work required, including moving activities forward, is important in reducing schedule risk, Sarnataro said.
You can connect and interact with other capital project and turnaround experts in the Plan & Design and Implement & Build groups in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.
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