By: Brian Cole, Senior Principal; Krystyna Riley, Senior Principal

A high-performing Turnaround Steering Team is your key to better planning and execution.

Turnarounds are a complex, challenging, and expensive part of capital intensive industries (e.g., refining, mining, power generation). Successful turnarounds require significant collaboration and alignment between operations, maintenance, and engineering to ensure best-in-class performance.

Late scope jeopardizes turnaround schedules, adds additional costs, and increases safety risks. Here's what you can do about it.

Even the best-planned turnarounds experience some late scope; discovery work, compliance work, and last minute process optimization opportunities are par for the course.  In highly disciplines companies it’s common to anticipate late-scope of up to 7%, which is often seen as a best in class industry benchmark.

By: Brian Cole, Senior Principal; Krystyna Riley, Senior Principal

The effective, efficient, and safe performance of contractors is critical to superior turnaround performance; their performance can often make or break the cost and duration of your turnaround. Like most of our clients, you probably train and orient your contractors—before a turnaround begins—in your company’s policies, safety procedures, work rules, quality standards, and culture. While this initial training is vital for getting off to a good start, our experience has been that the oversight and monitoring during the turnaround is even more important for ensuring top performance.

By: Brian Cole, Senior Principal; Krystyna Riley, Senior Principal

For each turnaround, you probably form a “turnaround team” for planning, scheduling, execution, and look-back. This team typically includes various organizational functions, meets often, and is responsible for the turnaround’s success.

Most turnaround work occurs during the execution phase—but key activities performed during the shutdown, cleanup, and startup phases (SCS) can make or break a turnaround’s success.

These portions of the turnaround should require a fraction of the time to complete, compared to total turnaround time. But poor planning and execution of blind lists, procedures, permits, or chemical cleaning work scope quickly lead to longer durations and higher cost.