Logistics: A Critical Element of Successful Outages, Turnarounds and Shutdowns

This book encapsulates our Work Execution Management Domain within our Uptime Elements Framework.

If you have ever worked a shutdown, turnaround, or outage, depending on what your organization calls these events, I am certain that you can relate many successes, but also possibly many efforts that were less than successful. These efforts are extremely difficult due to the large amount of work that needs to be completed in a very short time span. There’s also a great deal of cost associated with this type of work that further compounds the stress. Organizations spend a great deal of time and effort developing outage plans and comprehensive and intricate work schedules to enable them to complete the work within the allotted time. What is often missed due to its vast complexity is the logistics – all of the elements that, when combined, support the successful work plan. Logistics is the glue that holds the work plan and schedule together.

During my forty-eight years working in maintenance reliability within the petrochemical industry, I have worked many turnarounds. I would like to tell you that each one I worked on was successful, but I’d be lying. Many were far less successful than I envisioned at the start. What I discovered over my career is that while you may have a well-developed work plan and schedule, if you don’t have sound logistics, problems will occur as the plan’s execution progresses.

This book provides you with a vast amount of information about outage logistics. If you start your effort early enough and use the information in this book to develop your logistics plan, you will vastly improve the ability of your organization to complete the outage on time, on budget, safely, with quality results.