Completing a turnaround ahead of schedule, on budget and with zero incidents and injuries
A shift to a collaborative culture across operations led to world-class turnaround performance
7 Days
Completed ahead of schedule
Challenge
A US refinery owned by a multinational energy firm had scheduled a 54-day turnaround of one of its units for maintenance purposes. The $200M turnaround included a temporary shutdown of the unit. With a history of low success in safety, quality, schedule, and cost in turnaround projects of this scale and complexity, the project team had identified a number of challenges to overcome, including:
- Changing mindsets in an industry where many people believe incidents and injuries are ‘the price of doing business’
- Managing the scope of the turnaround while ensuring quality was not impacted
- Creating a collaborative culture where key stakeholders were both committed to high performance and aligned with how to achieve it
- Anticipating and mitigating against potential breakdowns in communications and relationships
Solution
Together, we identified three main areas of focus for the project: to perform quality work, to maintain a predictable schedule, and to work in a cost-effective way. The project team aligned expectations across critical groups to deliver on their agreed commitments through a combination of formal and informal leadership and performance coaching for teams and individual. Essential to this success was the ongoing enrolment of key stakeholders and the workforce at every level during the project. This engagement of the whole refinery kept everyone clear on their individual and collective role within the project and strengthened the commitment to achieving the turnaround end results. A culture of open and collaborative communication was encouraged between contractors and maintenance and operations teams. Leadership from both the refinery and contractors actively demonstrated their values and commitment to a culture of performance excellence throughout turnaround.
Client Goals
A year prior to the scheduled event, the project team began working with JMJ to develop a roadmap to achieve their vision of:
- Executing the refinery turnaround on schedule and within budget
- Improving productivity and efficiency
- Completing Incident and Injury-Free™ and with high reliability
- Achieving a safe start up at the end of the project
World-class turnaround performance will require us to shift to a collaborative culture of excellence. For this culture to take root and thrive it must be transparent, embody teamwork and be visible everywhere. I have observed exemplary operations and maintenance collaboration throughout the planning phases. Through this careful planning, we will maximize efficiency and deliver a World-Class event next year.
Consistent with our Tenets of Operation, the Turnaround team worked really hard to deliver a well developed work list plan that ensures we maintain the integrity of our units, allowing us to operate within design and environmental limits, and help make a step change in reliability performance. It is imperative for us to make sure we have a clear plan and understand our work scope. Better planning will translate to better execution – in safety, quality, duration and cost.
Results
The event was completed seven days ahead of the Turnaround’s targeted days. One million worker hours were completed and, with over 4,500 workers on site during the peak two weeks, there were no recordable injuries or process safety incidents.
Ahead of schedule
Project completed seven days ahead of target
Incident and Injury-Free
With zero recordable injuries or environmental/process injuries
Within scope
Turnaround and shutdown on scope at $200M