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Simple Steps to Success in Outage Planning

Many companies have renewed focus on improving major outage effectiveness. A major outage is defined as a planned maintenance shutdown of operations, typically greater than 16 hours and occurring one - three times per year. Effective management of the entire outage process is of vital importance to a company’s cost competiveness as outages are one of the most costly maintenance activities in terms of facility and equipment downtime, labor, and contract cost.

Adoption of a clearly defined Outage Management Process Model is critical to establishing a routine process and discipline to effectively prepare, execute and continuously improve your major outages cost. This model should map out the requirements for five key phases of the outage process and establish disciplines that focus on planning and scheduling, managing, and controlling outage work, as shown below in Figure 1. As the Outage Management Process Model highlights, the majority of outage success is determined by effective preparation in advance of the actual outage execution. Further, closing the process loop, continuous improvement is achieved through conducting a formal Post Outage Review to establish what went well and identify opportunities for improvement that should be implemented during the next outage.

 

Figure 1. The Outage Management Process Model

 

Key Outage Management Process Model Steps:

Step 1 Conduct a formal review of the last outage and identify “lessons learned”, good and bad.
Make sure you involve all key outage players and analyze the past outage performance reviewing three main components: Preparation, Execution, and Plant Start-up. Develop an action plan to improve the next outage based on what you have learned.

Step 2 Identify outage constraints - budgetary, backlog of work, downtime needed and job priorities. Prioritize your maintenance work based on asset criticality and defect severity.

Step 3 Detail, Plan and Schedule outage jobs - all jobs should be scheduled using a Gantt chart with identified critical path and the most critical jobs (identified by risk - safety, time, and budget) should receive a higher level of oversight and planning effort.

Step 4 Conduct a Check Readiness Phase - Develop and implement a Preparation Matrix, conduct a risk analysis (identify the risk, implement actions to reduce high risks to acceptable levels) of critical jobs and level-load job schedules with a reality check of resource requirements. Perform a “dry run” of the outage with key leaders walking the group through the outage to ensure everyone is synchronized.

Step 5 Execute - Utilize visual management tools using an “Outage Management Wall” approach, define roles and responsibilities. Don’t forget to follow up and communicate with updated job Gantt charts. Manage by exception, reviewing updated job Gantt charts at daily progress meetings. Focus attention on jobs and tasks that are “Off Schedule” and corrective actions.

Implementing the Outage Management Process Model and its components will net a solid and quantifiable return on investment.

If you would like to discuss a few ideas or have questions on Outage Planning please contact me, Mike Gehloff at 888-335-8276 or mgehloff@gpallied.com 

Find out more about GPAllied 

 

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