Smart Shutdowns: Avoid Costly Mistakes with Your Outages

Many organizations spend too much time searching for—and starting implementation of—new reliability and maintenance concepts, and very little time on implementation and improvements of what they just started. Let me give some examples of my own observations as they relate to the statement above. Some time ago I met with a group of supervisors, planners, and craftspeople—the front line of maintenance—in a mill.

If you need to implement a new planning and scheduling program, you’re probably discovering that the task can be rather daunting. But there are ways to achieve an environment that will support a planning and scheduling program that works with what you already have in place and takes into account what your team is able to manage throughout implementation and beyond. If you take a closer look at what you already have, putting the final touches on a successful planning and scheduling program may not really be that big a beast to tackle.

Since there has been tremendous progress in planning and scheduling in the process industry during the last 20 years, it might be worthwhile to give an overview of the current state-of-the-art of planning and scheduling problems in the chemical process industry. This is the purpose of the current review.

Planning should be done before work is scheduled. You can say that all work is always planned before you do the work. That is a fact. The question is how efficient can this be done?

Planners struggle too much over developing an accurate estimate for each job. Many managers expect planners to develop perfect time estimates. They may even grade technicians and planners on actual field performance vs. the estimates. As a result, planners agonize over the estimates to the point where they don’t get all the jobs planned; even the ones planned still aren’t “accurate.”

Effective shutdown management is critical to the operation of mills, for without well-planned and executed shutdowns, equipment reliability suffers, and the mill pays the price in poor quality and lost production. Becoming proficient at managing shutdowns is a way to reduce overall downtime costs so that shutdowns themselves do not consume the savings they are capable of generating.