Turnaround Maintenance Refresher
Turnaround Maintenance is a scheduled event where processing plants – such as oil & gas, petrochemical, or refining plants – briefly shut down operations. During this outage, companies perform asset maintenance work not possible during normal operations.
Plants might install a new operating system that will boost productivity in the future, tune-up some existing equipment, or execute some preventive maintenance measures. It’s just like a NASCAR driver pulling off the road for a pit stop. Sure they lose ground in the race, but they more than make up for it with a fresh set of tires and a quick oil change.
While plant turnaround is essential in maximizing your plant utilization, it is also remarkably expensive. For many plants, the turnaround process represents the single largest expense from their maintenance budget.
Costs add up quickly because, first and foremost, every day that your plant is shut down, you lose out on valuable productivity. Even an extra day or two can be the difference between turning a profitable quarter or slipping into the red.
For this reason, minimizing your plant’s downtime via a rapid turnaround process is the top priority. Plants hire outside contractors, project management experts, and turnaround management teams, all while paying workers overtime to ensure everything during the outage sticks to the timeline.
While all these costs taken together have a serious impact on your company’s bottom line, they also provide an opportunity for your plant to jump ahead of the competition.
If you can clearly understand your work scope, streamline your process, and modernize your approach, you can effectively reduce downtime and bolster your performance. That’s where digitalization comes into play.
Digitalization’s Impact on Turnaround Maintenance
Modern turnarounds are typically devoid of digitalization technologies and, as a result, remarkably inefficient. Instead of quickly documenting issues, effortlessly sharing data, and utilizing real-time status onsite to manage the necessary work, they’re stuck manually moving information around.
Partnering with a digital solution provider can enhance your process and make everyone’s lives a whole lot easier – and more profitable. Here are a few ways digitalization helps do just that.
Predictive Analytics Provide Scope Assurance
Implementing a digital solution to your maintenance planning provides an immediate improvement to forecasting.
Predictive analytics takes existing data points that you already have within your system and checks them against the existing variables of your upcoming turnaround. They’re so smart that they can predict exactly how many hours are needed for a certain task, how much budget is needed for each team, and so on.
In the end, using predictive analytics to forecast your scope of work will give you the assurance that you have allocated everything you need. This helps keep your key-performance indicators (KPIs) in check by never going over budget or over on time.
Digital Shows Tracking in Real-Time
Seeing information in real-time helps cut through red tape and keeps everyone moving at maximum capacity.
As the overseer of a Turnaround Maintenance operation, your job is to understand how well everyone is sticking to the plan and how close you’ll come to meet the deadline. With a digitalized process, managers can filter data by various categories (vendor, role, discipline, etc.) to see how long a frontline manager is physically within the work zone areas.
This tracking indicator is important because a common reason turnarounds fall behind is lack of leadership in the field. You can see who is spending the necessary hours being hands-on and who could step into the role a bit more.
Alternatively, if you’re on the frontlines of the maintenance work, your job might rely on the progress others are making throughout the plant. With real-time updates, you’ll see exactly when you are cleared to begin working on your portion of a project, or how far along you are in your current job.
No matter the scenario, you’ll benefit from knowing the status of work at any given time of the turnaround.
Closer KPI Tracking and Future Efficiency
While digitalization can help maintenance turnarounds tremendously the first time through, they only grow in value over time.
After you have completed turnaround maintenance, you will be in a much better position to analyze all of your newly tracked information. You’ll see exactly what the ROI was for certain initiatives, how tightly you were able to fit into the scope, and where you might be able to make further gains in the future.
The next time your plant performs scheduled turnaround maintenance, you’ll have a clear idea of what success looks like.
Partnering With a Digitalization Provider
At TruQC, we help industrial plants digitalize their turnaround maintenance process so that they can slash costs and boost their uptime.
We start by listening to you. You show us your reports, data collection needs, and approval hierarchy. We then use that information to create a framework that works within your processes and established workflow. You focus on improving your process – not overhauling it.
Get in touch today to speak with a project manager experienced in digitalization.
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