Category Archives: Shutdowns

The Stats Are In: Less Is More When It Comes to Maintenance Spending

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What if I told you the top performing asset management companies spend less money on maintenance and get better results from an operations perspective. Sounds too good to be true, right? According to data from Solomon and Associates, this is absolutely the case. Solomon and Associates are the gold standard of benchmarking, particularly in the oil industry. 98% of the refineries in the world subscribe to the Solomon Study, and executives make decisions based on their standing in the Solomon ratings. … Continue reading →

Safety on a Personal Level: How to Use the GoalZERO Process to Eliminate Injuries

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On-the-job safety is a major concern for any organization but in the shutdowns, turnarounds and outages world it is an essential focus. LyondellBasell’s Turnaround Project Manager and Mainstream Conference speaker, Joe Jackson, shares how their safety program uses a personal approach to eliminate injuries and the results yielded their best year ever for lowest recordable injuries. LyondellBasell was looking to build an umbrella concept for their safety programs and GoalZERO was what was chosen and, you probably guessed it, the goal is zero injuries. Our current mantra is GoalZERO 100 which makes reference to the concept of 100% of the people, 100% of the time. Every company has some sort of safety process, but what I find different about GoalZERO is how it brings safety to a personal level. I see it as my challenge to help people recognize the need to internalize safety messages and learn from other people versus from their own experience, since in general with safety people don’t really hear the message until they have their own event. It’s like when you were growing up and was told “don’t touch the stove it’s hot,” and what did you do? Touch the stove. So how do you switch this around where it becomes more natural for people to recognize and understand hazardous situations without actually experiencing them? Planting Seeds I like to think of myself as a Johnny Appleseed for safety. I plant seeds in people so when the light bulb does go off and someone realizes … Continue reading →

Optimizing Your Shutdown Program in 5 Steps

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Manufacturing facilities know downtime is money. Every hour you are offline for a shutdown is costly from both lost revenue and cost of the workforce employed to maintain the facility. Christer Idhammar, Founder and Executive Vice President of IDCON and Mainstream Conference speaker gives his five best practices to optimize your next shutdown. This blog post will discuss five best practices that will optimize your shutdown program. Step 1: Strategic Review Step 2: Work Scope Review Step 3: Execution Planning Review Step 4: Integrated Schedule Review Step 5: Close Out Review Step 1: Strategic Review By optimizing your shutdown timing and drivers, you’ll generate a significant opportunity to improve mechanical availability, particularly if your facility has alternate production capacity and intermediate storage. The best practice is to complete a strategic review; by doing so you’ll be able to optimize the timing of any shutdown taking interactions with other plant and facility operating areas into account. Step 2: Work Scope Review Reducing the cost of a shutdown is easy when you eliminate work scope, however it’s not as easy to account for the consequences of the change. In a best practice program, plant personnel are assisted through a risk-based decision making process…achieving cost savings by eliminating work, deferring work, or changing techniques to deliver the same or better results with lower risk exposure. Step 3: Execution Planning Review The third step in your shutdown process should be the execution planning review. This is designed to prepare the best contracting and work … Continue reading →

Using Data Dashboards for Shutdown Success

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If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it, says OneSteel Shutdown Manager and Mainstream Conference speaker Tony Keehn. Measurement is critical for any shutdown, but how you present your data may be even more important. One of my favourite mantras for shutdown management is “if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. The beauty of data is it gives us the power to make timely decisions based on accurate information. We all understand that good data could mean avoiding a serious safety breach, staying within your all-important budget, and completing your shutdown on time. But sometimes the sheer amount of information available to us is simply overwhelming and it’s easy to get bogged down in the depths the detail. Enter the shutdown dashboard, a quick visual representation of your data that immediately shows whether your shutdown is going well (or not so well). It’s a tool I use on a regular basis and I believe is an essential communication tool for all levels of the business. Dashboards can come from many different areas – you could pull this directly from your CMMS and get some basic information you need. I prefer to use an external dashboard so I can extract the exact data I need and present information aligned with business KPI’s. I run a daily shutdown meeting at 10:00 each morning and the dashboard is always the central focus, so it’s important to get it right. Here are my tips for creating a solid shutdown dashboard. Make … Continue reading →

4 Ways to Get the Most From Your Contracting Partners

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At a time when cost improvements and productivity are more important than ever, collaboration with your contractors is key says Matt Smith, General Manager – Business Development at ATIVO and Mainstream Conference speaker. Instead of viewing your contractors as just another cost, it makes more sense to turn your contractor engagements into a source of competitive advantage. For many asset owners, it’s just not feasible to maintain the staff numbers required to do some of the more specialised or resource intensive activities like shutdowns. That’s where contractors can provide valuable support. As well as enabling you to reduce fixed staff costs, contractors can prove useful when you don’t have the in-house expertise to deliver specialised work. And the added bonus? No staff performance issues to grapple with – if contracted staff are not doing what they should be, an effective contracting partner will proactively manage or replace them for you. But dealing with contractors comes with its own set of complexities. The temporary nature of contract work means there can be ownership problems. If people aren’t always on-site they may not have the emotional investment that others have. Therefore the perception can sometimes be that they’ll turn up, do the work and not really care about the outcome as much as what a permanent employee would do. Another issue I see at the moment is asset owners are only outsourcing at the very height of their peak times and are bringing in the absolute minimum number of contractors required. While … Continue reading →

The Shutdown Skills Shortage – An Alternative Approach

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Cliff Williams, Corporate Maintenance Manager at ERCO Worldwide and speaker at Mainstream Conference, argues that we don’t actually have a skills shortage when it comes to shutdowns. He explains his alternative approach to finding the resources you need for your shutdown. One of the major problems that companies involved in major shutdowns find is the lack of resources (skilled craftsmen) to complete the work required in the time available. Things are so bad that some companies are having to bring in welders, pipe fitters etc. from overseas. Anyone who has tried to hire a skilled tradesman for their manufacturing plant can testify that this is a real problem. We constantly hear the complaint that we are in a skills shortage and it’s only going to get worse unless we do something about it. Some are looking to the government to help – setting up apprenticeships, encouraging immigration, but this doesn’t seem to provoke much action. I think we need to try and find alternative solutions within our control – our organization certainly couldn’t fly in a few mechanics and electricians to help with our down days. I would like to suggest that Manufacturers and Shutdown Managers have some tools we could use to help ease the situation. But We’ve Always Done it That Way When I asked a couple of people from the utilities and chemical sectors why they did so much work during the shutdown, I got the same answer I get when I ask local maintenance managers why … Continue reading →

Can We Ever Achieve a Perfect Shutdown?

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John Bowie, Managing Director at Palm Crest and speaker at Mainstream Conference, explores the notion of “the perfect shutdown”. Is it an illusion we’re all chasing or can it actually be achieved? I often hear people say to me “20 years ago we used to do shutdowns with half the people and we never had these costs and expenses. You guys have a cast of thousands”. I come across that quote quite often and I have to stop and think: why do people think that? I’ve realised that in today’s shutdown environment, we have so many constraints (environmental issues, health and safety issues etc) which make our job a whole lot harder. The rules and red tape that were originally intended to help us, are ultimately just slowing down the process. Executing a successful shutdown in today’s environment is not easy. It’s a fine balance between achieving shutdown efficiency and abiding by the many rules and regulations that exist. Now you may feel like your organisation has everything under control and has learned how to perform the perfect shutdown. The question is: can we ever achieve perfection? The simple answer, in my opinion, is no we cannot! Here’s why: shutdowns are full of variables. There are very few absolutes in our shutdown world- no two shutdowns are ever the same. So using a blueprint from past events never really accounts for the finite matters that you often have no control over. And these are the ones that end up being … Continue reading →