Optimizing Value Extraction from Turnarounds

Turnarounds represent the most significant portion of a plant's yearly maintenance budget and can affect the company's bottom line if mismanaged. They are necessary to ensure that equipment will not fail and cause severe accidents, which could result in a catastrophe and a consequent unscheduled outage. Turnarounds are hard to manage. The most dangerous period for any company is not when it is fully operational, but rather when it is in transition. During a turnaround, thousands of separate procedures are performed, often by contractors who are unfamiliar with the specific site. Some of these procedures involve highly volatile substances or risk-laden working environments such as confined spaces. In order to realize the benefits of an effective turnaround, companies must fully understand the risk environment, and both plan as well as allocate resources accordingly. The risk profile of a turnaround is indeed quite broad. Poor planning and execution can lead to costly delays, damage to critical assets, extensive environmental damage and severe safety incidents, which may include the loss of life. Such incidents have the potential extensively to affect company assets and public image. With this challenge, however, comes opportunity – a turnaround provides an ideal context for optimizing assets, taking action to reduce energy consumption and improving process efficiency. Recent technological advancements, coupled with an integrated approach to sustainable operations management, can help to reduce production costs and to achieve the bottom line. This paper will describe the benefits of improving the front-end contractor hiring process, vital to keeping control of turnarounds, as it not only initiates safety dialogue, but also clarifies the financial and practical implications of incorporating expectations into contractors’ bids. The process steps covered include the selection of contractors with demonstrated satisfactory safety performance, contractual requirement to work safely and clarification of safety expectations upon award. Moreover, the paper will review the DuPont Turnaround Model.