Shutdown / Turnaround Planning
Shutdown / Turnaround Planning
(OP)
We have a very condensed shutdown - something like 1600 work orders (with multiple tasks and resources) completed in 7 to 10 days. 24/7. Cost is about a million dollars a day to be down.
1st Question: Given all the time in the world to plan has anyone actually pulled off a nearly live actual/baseline plan so you can level as jobs come up or go off track. I think you'd have to be constantly updating it all day and night to have any value. If you have done it what type of resources for entering did you require?
2nd - Has anyone ever set-up unknown contractors as resources? I.e - Welder 1, Welder 2... Welder 50 to try and level or do you try and change it to Welder with 5000% units. What works better?
Thanks.
1st Question: Given all the time in the world to plan has anyone actually pulled off a nearly live actual/baseline plan so you can level as jobs come up or go off track. I think you'd have to be constantly updating it all day and night to have any value. If you have done it what type of resources for entering did you require?
2nd - Has anyone ever set-up unknown contractors as resources? I.e - Welder 1, Welder 2... Welder 50 to try and level or do you try and change it to Welder with 5000% units. What works better?
Thanks.





RE: Shutdown / Turnaround Planning
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RE: Shutdown / Turnaround Planning
1. I have done many projects with live/baseline and it usually works fine. My sugestion would be:
• As TTFN said, take your time planning, use only physical predecessor (don't use resources availability as a predecessor)
• Use PERT and DELPHY to estimate times
• Because of the importance it may be wise to have some slack on your schedule
• Update every 12 hours seems reasonable (input work done, reschedule your undone work and level resources)
2. Use generic resources, (5000% or 50 (options/schedule/ decimal)). Otherwise you will not be able to level your resource which will be the key factor.
Regards
YJO
RE: Shutdown / Turnaround Planning
A modern approach may be to have also an add-in for risk planning, including probabilities for breaking down certain equipment. With the attached Monte Carlo simulation you probably get better and more realistic minimum and maximum times compared with the course result of the Pert Analysis as in MS Project 2003 and 2007. Although this may still be better than just relying on single values.
Another good practise may be to add Deadlines, rather than constraints such as Must Finish On or Should Not Finish Later Than. The Total Slack will take the Deadlines into account and is a very good management tool. Another advantage is that often MS Project will warn that there is somewhere a conflict. If you neglect the conflict you will never get a warning again, thus spoiling all your efforts.
All this is probably way too late for your problem but may be of any help for the future.
Why an easy solution if you can make it complicated?
Greetings from the Netherlands
RE: Shutdown / Turnaround Planning
We update schedules just before the end of every shift in order to have updated shift schedules and progress reports ready at shift change to help facilitate work priorities and management decision making.
Bernard
InterPlan Systems
- eTaskMaker Planning Software
- ATC Professional Turnaround Management Software
RE: Shutdown / Turnaround Planning
Even a resource-leveled schedule serves only as a workflow forecast because it does not handle natural variation in task durations and uncertain events in the system. This forecast is more reliable than a critical path schedule with a lot of resource overallocation instances. To deal with such variation and uncertainty, the schedule must be updated (with automatic resource leveling) as frequently as necessary. As time progresses, the baseline schedule will be increasingly invalid.