Overview

For many organizations, shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages (STOs) are essential components when considering maintenance work processes. This is because maintenance resources are typically used to perform STO work. The STO resource requirements must be balanced with normal maintenance resource requirements to enable successful scheduling. Weekly allocation of these resources may be part of the capacity calculation for the maintenance weekly schedule.

Only minor STOs are part of the weekly maintenance schedule. These types of STOs may be routine downturns on major pieces of equipment where the routine maintenance crew is used to perform the work. These may occur one day during the week, or perhaps even a few days during a month. The resources required to perform this type of STO work is typically just deducted from the weekly craft capacity before the routine maintenance schedule is produced.

However, major STO work occurs when an entire plant or facility (or a major section thereof) is shut down for repairs and retrofit. To understand clearly the resource requirements for this type of STO work, one must understand the objectives for STOs. The main objective statement for STOs could be the maximum work performed in the minimum time, with the highest quality work, with adherents to safety and environmental standards, and a quality restart of the equipment. When planning for STO work, multiple planners may be involved in planning jobs, but the coordination for the STO project is usually the responsibility of a single planner. For this arrangement to be successful,...