When looking at all of the tasks that occur leading up to, during, and after a planned maintenance shutdown it can be helpful to categorize each task as internal or external. Internal tasks are those that can only be performed when the process is stopped, while External tasks can be done either before shutdown or after starting back up.
Here are examples of tasks often found happening during an outage that, some of or all, could have been done while the process was running:
- Repairs to work done during the outage
- Reinspecting someone’s work
- Waiting for parts, tools, work instructions
- Waiting for a ride to the work face
- Waiting for inspector, permit writer
- Building scaffolds
- Moving materials or tools to the point of use
- Treasure hunts, scavenger hunts
- Preparing reports, making presentations
- Rerunning ‘the schedule’
Being able to see tasks as internal or external is the first step toward reducing the planned shutdown duration.
You’ve heard the sayings “What gets measured gets better” and “Inspect what you expect”, well here’s a management control tool you can use to help drive the right behaviors leading up to and during your plant shutdown. As a lean thinking leader take one of the cards, grab one of your people, and go for a walk. Then do something with what you find.
Download a copy of these checklists here.
Whether you call it a plant shutdown, outage, or turnaround getting the right work done, safely, and in the shortest time can be tricky. Here are approaches we’ve taken that have helped make dramatic improvements in reducing planned and unplanned downtime:
Externalize – do nothing during the shutdown that can possibly be done while the process is running
- SMED 101 – separate internal from external
- Staging supplies – no ‘treasure hunts’
- Prepare tool fixtures
- Prepare work areas
- Dry run, dress rehearsal, walk through, simulations
- Checklists
Constraint Busting – find the constraint(s) and exploit/subordinate/elevate
- Work scope scrubs – select work base on probability of failure and risk impact
- Schedule scrubs – eliminate, combine, rearrange, simplify
Shutdown & Start Up – making the plant ready for maintenance work
- Checklists
- Dry run & simulations
- Labor plans
- Safety permits – lockout tag out efficiently
- Parallel teams, chase the rabbit
Parallel Planning – bust organizational silos with concurrent cross functional teams
- Work scope and schedule iterations and scrubs
- Risk-based work selection
- Contractor work reviews
- Dry run dress rehearsals
Non Stop Critical Path – understand the trade offs when applying additional labor
- Separate man and machine – machine based operations never stop (welding, blasting), man based operations suffer fatigue (demolition, fabricating)
- Overlapping shifts
- Relief crews
- Runners, spotters, observers
Milestone Reporting – what gets measured get better
- Categorize activities
- Sequence prerequisites
- plan vs actual
- deviation, root cause, and countermeasures
Scope Change Management – unplanned work is a failure of planning or reliability engineering
- Scope freeze, scope change cutoff
- Single point of authority to add/drop/change scope
- Risk-based decision making on ‘found’ or ‘discovered’ work
- Cost and duration offsets
- Post shutdown root cause analysis and corrective action
Command Center – transparency
- The Plan is available for all, and easy to understand
- Status of all work is easy and quick – exceptions, deviations stand out
- Missing or stale information is obvious, as is who is responsible
- Information ownership, source, and ‘freshness’ is easy to see
- Deviations have countermeasures clearly displayed
- Information updated before/after not during meetings
- When the critical path change inevitably happens, new plan is in place in minutes not hours
Management Controls – inspect what you expect if you want to sustain
- Preparation reviews
- Gemba walks and paired observations
- Site inspections
- Checklist reviews
- Performance metrics and countermeasures
After Action Review – no shutdown is flawless; learn and improve
- What was the plan and what actually happened
- What went well? What went wrong?
- Separate common from special cause
- Find solutions for common cause, buffer risks for special cause
Shutdown, outage, turnaround, or whatever you call it can vary dramatically in effort, duration, and cost, for example:
- Months off line and millions of dollars in contract labor for a turnaround in an oil refinery
- Days or weeks for a chemical plant shutdown
- Hours for a recurring changeovers in many process industries
 NASCAR is a good example of what can be accomplished through planning, scheduling and execution. Major contributors to pit stop or shutdown performance include communication between production and maintenance and continuously working on improving the basics of planning and scheduling, execution and root cause problem solving. In the 1950s, a good pit stop lasted 4 minutes. If nothing had been done to improve these events in the years since (because everyone thought a four minute pit stop was good), we would still be watching them. Interestingly, a NASCAR driver is in constant contact with the pit crew. The driver doesn’t suddenly show up in the pit and complain about a problem with a right front tire, only to have the crew answer: “Let us go to the store and check on a spare tire.” Unfortunately, this happens daily in most plants. In NASCAR competition, there’s a strong motivation to win races; in our plants and facilities, there might be completely different factors driving motivation.
In addition to driving Planning and Scheduling to precision and excellence, NASCAR pit crews are continuously working on improving the basics. This includes, among other things:
- Analyzing problems and successes
- Training 20 hours per week for 20 seconds of work on Sundays
- Doing work right before doing it fast
Regardless of the length of a plant shutdown, the same principles apply in making these events more effective or leaner.
- First and foremost, problem-free operation should be possible between scheduled shutdowns. Mean time between production losses including quality, time, and production rate should be as long as possible.
- Shutdowns should be performed with the right quality on all jobs, as quickly as possible.
The combination of how many shutdowns you have and how long they are affects both your production volume and your ability to deliver product on time. It is a given that the shutdown must be scheduled (when and who executes what) and that all the jobs must be planned (what, how, all tools, spare parts and materials, lockout/tagout, etc.) before the shutdown begins. In addition, all shutdowns should have a set time for freezing the schedule. After the freezing point, no new jobs will be accepted without harsh criticism, and a corrective action plan. Consider post freeze work requests to be an outage planning and reliability engineering process defect, and act accordingly.
- Determine Total Cycle Time
- Determine Queue Times between steps
- Create Step segments proportional to the task times
- Place steps, queue’s along the line segment in the order that they happen
> Place Value Adding steps above the line
> Place Non-value Adding steps below the line
- Draw in feedback loops & label Yield percentages
- Sum Activity / Non-activity times
- Sum Value / Non-value Times
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