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Turnarounds are a complex process needed to restore and revamp industrial facilities.
Depending on the size of your facility, a turnaround can halt production completely throughout the entire facility or only a few units at a time. During this time, facilities can also be flooded with thousands of contractors, individual tasks, new equipment on site and more. A successful turnaround is not an easy feat, with over 50% being delayed and 80% going over budget.
However, keeping your next turnaround on schedule and on budget is attainable – turnaround managers have been doing it for years. As industry’s best turnaround management solution, weavix™ makes managing your workforce (including your contract workers) during a turnaround easier. Not only are field workers given multimedia communications from anywhere in your facility, our Internet of Workers (IoW) platform also allows for more in-field visibility, all available in one place.
Our mission, just as yours, is to get your facility up and running again as fast as possible while keeping you on schedule and within budget. Learn more about what weavix™ can do for you during your next turnaround here.
What is a Turnaround?
A turnaround is a scheduled time where a process unit is decommissioned. While most shutdowns are necessary for routine maintenance and repair, many industrial facilities use this time for other purposes as well. Whether a facility needs to upgrade or replace equipment, establish new processes or implement other changes within the unit, a turnaround is the time to do it.
While the unit is completely decommissioned during a turnaround, they are one of the most significant pieces of an annual plan and budget. Facilities need to cease production until the turnaround is complete, plus cover labor, equipment, materials and other costs associated. Every turnaround is different, focusing on the goals and objectives set forth beforehand, so each must be carefully planned well in advance.
The Pros and Cons of a Turnaround
Many might wonder why companies invest millions of dollars to do a turnaround every year for their facilities. Well, it’s easy to sum it up into one word: proactivity. Companies want to be proactive in maintaining and repairing their equipment before anything unexpected happens. They also want to stay proactive in their operations as well. Streamlined operations, minimal inefficiencies and functional equipment helps keeps workers safe and expenses as low as possible, and all of these can be assessed during a turnaround.
Turnarounds allow time to revamp your industrial facilities, but they are not without their cons. As we mentioned before, turnarounds are complex and oftentimes lead to delays or going over budget, which negatively impacts the company financially. They are also notorious for unveiling unforeseen issues needing attention. With each delay, you miss out on production which in turn ends up costing you more than you originally intended. It’s easy for a turnaround to exceed the initial scope, which leads to an unsuccessful turnaround.
The key to a successful turnaround is exceptional management of all the workers, contractors and equipment on your facility, and your turnaround solution needs to assist in that.
When you use weavix™ during your turnarounds, you get that and more. Voice and video messaging allows for instant collaboration with everyone, no matter the company, within your facility. We also validate equipment utilization and activity logs for your workers in real time. In one holistic platform, weavix™ makes it easier than ever to manage your workforce during a turnaround.
What’s the Difference Between Shutdowns, Turnarounds and Outages?
There are three main types of turnaround activities: shutdowns, turnarounds and outages. These are most referred to as STOs. Each of these events are multi-million-dollar ordeals and the terms are often used interchangeably, but there are slight differences.
While a turnaround is a scheduled, temporary halt of a particular unit or the entire plant, neither a shutdown nor an outage are planned or scheduled. A shutdown is a temporary halt due to any disruption in the production process, from not enough materials or manpower to accidents and natural disasters.
Outages are most caused by a malfunction in equipment or accidents requiring a temporary stop. Both can affect supply and daily operations to a great extent.
Turnaround Solutions for Every Situation
Turnarounds tend to be extremely volatile, with new changes and unpredictable issues arising throughout the whole process. While you can’t plan for every tiny detail, having a turnaround solution that’s flexible enough to help get you back on schedule as soon as possible helps alleviate the financial and logistical burden that comes with delays. weavix™ is this solution.
By digitally connecting both your frontline workers and contractors, weavix™ assists managers in overcoming many common difficulties experienced during a turnaround.
Keeping your Turnaround within Scope
It’s almost expected that a turnaround’s initial scope is going to increase, but some manage to increase nearly 50%. If left unchecked, excessive unplanned work can stress your crews, your contractors, your management, your schedule and your bottom line. When you use weavix™ as your turnaround solution, your frontlines become completely visible in our IoW platform, meaning you get data to combat scope creep.
By utilizing weavix™, you’re able to better manage resources and minimize costs to stay as close as possible to your initial budget. For example, you notice during your turnaround that an industrial boiler needed an unexpected repair. Our logistics data makes it simple to quickly plan who will work on the repairs needed and when, plus allocate and manage the resources necessary to complete it.
Overcoming Worker & Contractor Inefficiencies
Turnarounds can’t happen without your workforce and contracted laborers. However, simple walkie talkies and paper forms leave a lot of room for mistakes and inaccurate reports. Without complete visibility in the field, efficiently managing both parties with complete certainty is nearly impossible.
This is why weavix™ takes a two-pronged approach when it involves turnaround management: communication and data. With communication, we guarantee your frontline, office employees, plus your contractors are all connected at the push of a button. Whether they need regular push-to-talk (PTT), video collaboration or in-line language translation and dictation, our industrial communication devices serve them well during the whole turnaround process.
By providing secure, reliable communication to everyone in your facility, we’re able to minimize many common mistakes that occur during a turnaround. Then, using logistics and validation data, managers can assign and delegate tasks and responsibilities more effectively.
Conducting Organized & Automated Registrations
To get into the facility, both contractors and workers need to provide OSHA certifications, identification, TWIC cards and more prior to arrival at your facility. It’s a lot of paperwork, especially when you’re accounting for the increased amount of people coming into your facility during a turnaround. Ensuring everyone has all the needed documentation can stress your registration process, creating unnecessary delays just to get in.
To ensure optimal worker performance and a smooth turnaround, companies are looking for ways to efficiently streamline registrations and get workers and contractors focused on turnarounds. As the best turnaround solution available, weavix™ bypasses all the paperwork needed, creating a fast, simple and automated registration.
Whether it’s a worker going to badge in for their shift or a new contractor presenting his OSHA certifications, everything is available in weavix™. With a quick scan of a QR code, all of the required paperwork is brought up automatically and stored in our secure IoW platform. Not only does this drastically decrease registration time for everyone involved in your turnaround, it also helps keep accurate logs of people going in and out of your facility or, if you wanted to drill down for more granularity, specific units.
Managing the Logistics During your Turnaround
Typically, turnaround schedules are pushed to be as short as possible to get everything back up and running without missing too many production days. This, however, is a constant struggle and often leaves little room for unexpected additions. While it’s a good practice for turnaround managers to add buffer time, weavix™ helps make the most of your time so you can stay on schedule as much as possible.
Our platform can validate equipment usage and overall logistics within your facility instantly. As such, weavix™ assists in staying on schedule and, when a delay occurs, respond quickly and effectively while managing all of the available resources. The ultimate goal is to get your turnaround completed successfully and on time so you and your crews can get back to work.
Keeping your Workforce Safe
Safety is a priority whenever people are on the facility. When the facility is flooded with contractors and staff, while new tasks are getting assigned constantly, however, it can get hectic fast. To help keep safety as a top priority during the turnaround process, weavix™ has built-in safety features readily available and accessible for everyone.
weavix™ equips everyone in your facility with a smart industrial radio. With it, crews can report safety concerns they notice in the field – field observations – and management can notify them of any emergencies – mass notifications.
With our built-in field observations, your crews and contractors can instantly relay information about what’s going on directly from the frontline. During a turnaround, this is incredibly useful as workers are inspecting and repairing any faulty equipment. If a worker notices a loose or faulty pipe, they can instantly alert management to further inspect and, if needed, include it in the turnaround.
Mass notifications work the other way, allowing management to instantly communicate with the frontline and contractors in an instant. If there’s a severe storm near your facility, you can send a mass notification to everyone in your facility, relaying needed information to keep everyone safe. You can also give the all-clear afterwards, letting your turnaround continue. Our mass notifications take over all in-use and sleeping devices in your facility, ensuring the message gets to everyone.
Be Prepared for your Next Turnaround with weavix™
Turnarounds are one of the most stressful events that an industrial facility will go through, but weavix™ makes them easier to manage. As one of the best turnaround solutions, weavix™ focuses on providing multimedia communication capabilities to the frontline workers and your contractors for better management. When combined with logistics and validation data, you’re able to gain more visibility throughout your facility to keep your turnaround on schedule and within budget.
Contact us today to get started with weavix™ for your next turnaround.
