Getting ready for your annual or semi-annual plant maintenance shutdown at this time of year? Whether you call it a shutdown, a turnaround, or an outage, it all results in a high-cost, big-impact event.
Like any complex task, a shutdown can look overwhelming at first, but take some time to break it down into phases with distinct goals for each phase and your stress level will go down considerably.
To keep the budget and schedule intact, remember to keep your to-do list as short as possible and focus on the things that can only be accomplished during a major shutdown. Everything else can be scheduled during normal preventive maintenance procedures.
According to the editors of Plant Services, a plant maintenance shutdown is best broken into five phases:
1. Definition/Scope of Work – Outline company goals and develop the work list; focus on safety, cost, schedule, labor hours, overtime, and task completion.
2. Prepare – Develop work list plan details and work packages for the finalized list; decide what work will be done by internal resources and by external resources; identify pre-shutdown work and any contingency plans needed
3. Execute – Complete the work identified and prepare for scope of work changes as inspections turn up unexpected additional work items; update schedule as necessary; verify that your asset base is as good or better condition as it was before.
4. Startup/Turnover – Turn over to operations group when punch list has been reconciled; begin ramping up to normal operations while looking for failures as this is the most likely time for them to occur.
5. Evaluate – Demobilize, disassemble, remove and clean up any equipment used during the maintenance procedures; review the process and look for best practices/lessons learned including safety, quality, logistics, work scope, financials, contractor performance, organization and schedule; reconcile and analyze the shut-down costs including labor, materials, parts, etc.
Of course, you can’t schedule an emergency and by now you have learned that the universe can turn on a dime and to expect the unexpected. ACS won’t be shutting down, and your ACS repair team will be here to help you with your industrial electronic equipment repairs, even the unexpected rush electronic repairs.
Since we never know exactly what will be on the loading dock in the morning, every day is the “unexpected” for us and we are ready for almost any repair and in any quantity!