Using Data to Drive Your Turnaround Planning Strategy

Introduction

As your facility approaches its next turnaround, you’re probably evaluating your plan for opportunities to extend turnaround intervals, reduce scope, and minimize costs without having a negative impact on production post-start-up. However, using the data you have today, are you able to confidently quantify the impact of deferring specific tasks to the next turnaround?

In an economic landscape that is only getting more competitive, effective turnaround performance is increasingly critical for owner/operators seeking to improve financial performance. By executing an effective turnaround strategy, owner/operators can confidently extend turnaround intervals, reduce scope, minimize outage duration, and control costs to improve availability and manage risk. Many owner/operators have begun to incorporate outputs from Risk-Based Inspection (RBI) programs to help address these challenges, however, many approaches are limited in their ability to quantify the impact of deferring tasks until the next turnaround.

In this article, we’ll discuss the current challenges with turnaround planning and how quantitative, data-driven modeling can help you optimize turnaround priorities, scope, duration, and intervals to maximize your return on investment (ROI) and ensure you confidently prioritize the right activities in your next turnaround.

Challenges with the Current State of Turnaround Planning

While specific challenges with turnaround planning vary from facility to facility, there are several common issues owner/operators often face.

First, many owner/operators have preset intervals, budgets, and scopes with increasing pressure to continually reduce cost and planned downtime. Second, many owner/operators are leveraging outputs from RBI programs to determine when assets should be inspected. While RBI helps rank relative risk, it was not intended to be a precise risk model, and as a result, it can be difficult to quantify the real world business impact of pushing out a specific task to the next turnaround on RBI outputs alone. Third, as owner/operators are finalizing the scope of an upcoming turnaround, there can be multiple rounds of qualitative discussions that focus on the current health of an asset instead of focusing on the future performance of the asset. Fourth, if there is a need to increase the turnaround budget based on a specific asset’s health or any other site-specific change, such as an upcoming change in feedstock, many owner/operators struggle to justify the reason they need to increase their budget or adjust turnaround scope to management.