How to Control the Risk in Plant Turnarounds
It is essential to know the risks in plant turnarounds in order to effectively manage them. Turnaround projects can involve many components, include hundreds of workers and budgets that delve into the millions. It is essential to work with experienced partners who not only understand turnaround procedures, but are forward thinking and innovative; constantly providing solutions that enable you to ‘be prepared for the unplanned’.
Tips From Plant Turnaround Experts
The Annual Turnaround Conference shares information on different processes and techniques as learned by industry experts, contractors and suppliers from across the United States and Canada. During this conference, one expert promoted the need to budget for Risks that are posed from worn parts; by keeping spares in reserve or ordering parts far in advance of the turnaround to avoid paying exorbitant expediting fees.
The ‘Time Versus Money’ Dilemma
Those who manage plant turnarounds are often caught between two deciding factors. On the one hand, the turnaround has to proceed as efficiently and safely as possible. However, if there are unforeseen repairs that need to be done, a decision has to be made whether the repairs can be done in time to meet the planned start-up and stay within budget or extending the outage and possibly incurring additional costs. Navigating this tightrope can be difficult and extremely costly if done incorrectly. This is why it is important to have experts on hand who have experience and can make things happen.
Three Essential Factors to Control Risk in Plant Turnarounds
When applied in the correct manner, these three factors will help enormously in the planning and execution of turnarounds.
1. Pre-Planning: Most turnarounds are planned a year or two in advance, but sometimes there are unplanned outages that happen. Being prepared for those emergency turnarounds can now be done!
2. Identify Trends: It is often common to see the same pieces of equipment and parts needing repair or having to be replaced each turnaround. Identifying Trends and having a plan of action in place can be the difference between having a successful on-time and under budget outage and one plagued with delays and cost overruns.
3. Vendor Partnership: Having a partnership with a vendor that understands your needs and the expertise to identify a Risk with the ability to provide solutions, is critical.
Partner with AMACS
With over 75 years of business experience, AMACS offers a complete line of mass transfer and separation internals. AMACS also has the expertise to design these internals; both hydraulically and mechanically. We provide consignment hardware for turnarounds, whether for one tower minor outages or for major plant wide turnarounds.
AMACS’ Tower Research Program not only documents the hardware and internals for each of your towers, but it also identifies trends for each turnaround so you can minimize the Risks of your outage.
The AMACS Team wants to partner with you! Contact us so we can share in more detail how our Tower Research Program can identify trends and minimizer risk for you and your plant.