Defining the Challenges
Turnarounds present many challenges. They are typified by rapid and unpredictable change, an unclear present and uncertain future, multiple and diverse interconnected factors, and a lack of clarity or awareness of the situation. Scheduling is a giant headache, involving masses of moving parts, thousands of people, multiple tools and constant change. Add to this scope creep and changes requiring unplanned work, the need for expert skillsets, top-level contractor management and coordination, and a clear understanding of the big picture, and you’ve really got a formula for late delivery and over-budget.
New Customer, Same Challenges
I recently accompanied a new Mobideo customer on their first digitalized turnaround of their refinery in North America using MobideoSTO. As with all customers, I first sat with the stakeholders in order to identify the specific challenges they were facing and understand what they wanted to achieve. Listening closely to their pain points, a range of issues were raised, particularly:
- Real-time tracking – knowing what is happening, as it happens
- Reliability, accountability and trustworthiness of contractors
- Reducing manual, mundane tasks to reduce workloads and increase efficiency
- Managing permissions and change requests
- Reducing paperwork to a minimum
- Improving communication between everyone involved in the turnaround
- Meeting the turnaround timetable and completing within budget.
Delivering Smart Turnaround Management
MobideoSTO addresses the root causes that lead to the huge schedule and cost overruns that characterize turnaround projects, while simultaneously improving the quality and safety of performance. This is achieved by:
- Integrating technologies to achieve better decision-making based on facts and insights from the field
- Implementing automation for faster response and reduced time spent on routine task management
- Connecting the workforce and stakeholders in real-time to all the information they need
- Continuously improving the process by providing access to detailed activity metrics that support data-driven, lessons-learned sessions.
This delivers numerous benefits, particularly better turnaround performance; standardized, aligned, efficient, accountable and agile workforces; and best practices for continuous improvement and benchmarking.
Seeing Results
Smart turnaround management delivers great results. In this recent turnaround, we succeeded in identifying gaps and areas where time management could be improved during the turnaround for task progression. And MobideoSTO provided complete visibility of the turnaround schedule, so that the turnaround leadership could more efficiently identify and plan priorities, actions and changes during shift handover meetings. This resulted in some important results, particularly:
- Receipt of timely updates of scheduled/P6 activities from both company personnel and contractors.
- Reliability of the accuracy of the actual reported progress.
- Elimination of manual updates by schedulers, saving 8 hours of work a day and freeing them to help with other duties during the turnaround.
Understanding the Results
Never forget the debrief. It’s the time that you can verify whether you have achieved your goals, and learn what should be improved in your next turnaround. In our recent turnaround using MobideoSTO, all the benefits focused on two key results:
- The turnaround was completed within budget.
- The turnaround was completed on time – the visibility into the turnaround progress tracking and KPI reporting enabled the leadership team to redirect resources and thereby meet the schedule.
Want to understand more how MobideoSTO, the first Digital STO Operating System intelligently integrates with your existing systems to deliver complete management of STO preparation, execution & analysis? Schedule a demo now.
