In an American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE)’s CEP article, Turnarounds: Strategic Opportunities to Improve (article excerpt – AIChE membership required for full access), Emerson’s Tim Olsen highlights the critical role of advanced planning.
Tim opens the article highlighting some challenges in executing turnarounds:
Mitigating the risk of cost and schedule overruns is vital to competitiveness and profitability. Turnaround teams are tasked with coordinating a limited workforce in a constrained time period and must also ensure maintenance crews are safely working on only the assets that need attention. Missing a required maintenance service or doing unnecessary work could extend the turnaround schedule and increase the probability of an unscheduled shutdown after the turnaround.
Turnarounds should be more than just a maintenance event:
…turnarounds extend far beyond maintenance and can have significant impacts on capital and operating budgets that can determine profitability for the manufacturer. These planned shutdown events are strategic opportunities for processing facilities to improve operational efficiency, reliability, and safety.
He notes the common practice of treating capital projects and turnarounds as separate events managed by separate teams, even when performed concurrently.
This leads to these events:
…becoming more complex because so many activities must be coordinated safely in a limited timeframe. Unfortunately, these added activities and the increased number of workers onsite often result in budget and schedule overruns, as well as a higher probability of a safety incident.
Planning concurrent turnarounds and capital projects:
…must be coordinated so that the right equipment, materials, and personnel can get where they need to go at the right time, and so that the work for the turnaround does not interfere with the capital project and vice versa.
If you’re an AIChE member, read the full article, or even if you’re not, read the excerpt for Tim’s reference to the top 10 reasons for failure in turnaround events.
Learn more about ways to mitigate risks and plan a successful turnaround in the Shutdowns, Turnarounds & Outages section on Emerson.com. You can also connect and interact with other turnaround and capital project managers at the Oct 1-5 Emerson Exchange conference in San Antonio, Texas.
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