How next-gen process control is cutting the cost of shutdown events

Shutdown, turnaround, and outage events (STOs) are both costly and dangerous for oil and gas companies. Planning, predictability, and control are vital to get interrupted processes back to normal in time, on budget, with no harm to workers, and with minimal unplanned work.

5 tips for successful STOs:

1. Planning – start planning for your next STO as soon as the last one is over. Create a standard process for documenting and implementing “lessons learned” from each one.
    
2. Research – track the actual time and cost of specific actions your company performs, and put systems in place to capture data on them and make it accessible.
    
3. Personnel – make sure you hire people with the skills and experience needed to manage STOs.
    
4. Measurement – set goals, then track progress towards and achievement of those goals. Again, make sure you have systems to capture and evaluate the results.
    
5. Communication – managing STOs can mean coordinating and communicating with as many as 1,000 people across dozens of different organisations. You’ll need a collaborative culture to keep everyone on the same page, and a central system to give you oversight of all activities.

Using big data to manage STOs

Most oil and gas companies today rely on scheduling and resource management tools such as Oracle’s Primavera P6 EPPM. One large gas company recently saw dramatic improvements in STO management after adding some of Oracle’s newer offerings: Primavera Unifier, Primavera Analytics, and Primavera Cloud Service, which work together to collect data on all the activities of all the many parties involved. Here are some of the results they achieved.

• Cut STO proposal/premise document review & approval time from 2-4 weeks to 1, a time saving of 65%.
• Shaved 40% of time off the STO scheduling process across scope definition and scheduling
• Saved 30% of time on change management by increasing accuracy and assurance
• Saved 30-40 minutes a day by generating automated daily status reports
• Saved 30 minutes a day with automated daily KPI reports
• Saved 30 minutes a day by using Primavera Unifier to access all information needed for the daily morning meeting

The level of process control needed for optimal STO management is superhuman–but increasingly, new data technologies are enabling companies to achieve ju