"When you look at a turnaround goal, it is ultimately to improve cost and schedule competitiveness while maintaining a high level of reliability,” said Jim Hernjak, turnaround manager at the ExxonMobil Baytown Refinery. “The first thing you have to do is identify the right work. You need to define that work early. The earlier you do it, the more effective you can be at planning and executing your turnaround. You need to manage the turnaround work scope to be within the executable abilities of your site. You have to understand all of that so you don’t bite off more than you can chew.”
Hernjak recently led a discussion on ensuring quality turnaround work scopes at the AFPM Reliability & Maintenance Conference and Exhibition in Austin, Texas.
“When you look at turnaround performance, you have the most ability to impact the outcome very early in the process,” he said. “So what you find is the further back you can actually define what your work list is, you have a much, much higher level of success when you execute.”
After a turnaround ends, within two months there is going to be a post-turnaround review. Then, according to Hernjak, there can be anywhere from two to five years of what is considered downtime before active planning starts again.
“At t-minus about 32 months before the next event, you start having your first set of reviews if you have a lot of major capital projects and a lot of other things going on,” he said. “At that point, you’re really starting to move into some of the aggressive turnaround planning concepts. You will have a linemen review about two years prior to the event. You will have your preliminary work scope not that long thereafter. At that review, they’re really testing how well your preliminary work list is coming together.
“You will have a prep review around t-minus 18 months. Not long after that, you want to freeze your work list. You need to have a good understanding of what is on your work list at that point in time, so that gives you the benefit of being on the front end of that curve. Really what we’re doing is trying to pull everything earlier and earlier into the process.”
Inevitably, Hernjak said it often feels like you’re rushing into milestones.
“We’re a week away from having to freeze the work list, and we’re still in engineering and projects aren’t quite ready,” he said. “So try and have a lot of leadership as a turnaround manager. Make sure folks understand milestones that are coming up.
You may not implement all of the turnaround best practices. There are a whole lot of things you could be doing to make your life easy. Not every site is going to pull at all of those best practices. So it’s through some of the reviews with external folks coming into your site that you start testing on how many of those best practices and efficiency ventures you’re actually using to get insight.”
In the middle of the planning phase, there will be an asset strategy quality review to make sure everything is accurate — how things are put together, how you define the risk and how you define every different technical aspect.
“At t-minus 16 months, you want to call your work list final,” Hernjak said. “This is your initial freeze point with the hard freeze coming later. Then you’ll do a final work scope review. A lot of times in that final work scope review, you’re taking a look at things beyond, so you understand everything that hits your criteria for selection, but you’re looking at competitiveness, ability to execute and all of the other softer sides.
“The final work scope review is to help you meet the expectations that are set from your leadership. We will, again, check that everything meets your selection criteria. You’re going to test things that were not based on your asset strategies. If for some reason you’re outside of your benchmarks, this review will give you an idea of how to get there. Final work scope is the key enabler for meeting your turnaround requirements and goals.”
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