Every facet of industry has been irrevocably impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in surprising and unexpected ways.
This is especially true for turnaround planning, which is still incorporating its lessons learned into its practices and procedures. At Downstream USA 2021, a panel of turnaround managers convened to discuss and share the strategies their organizations have implemented to prepare for and execute turnarounds in the post-pandemic future.
Celeste Jefferson, engineering, maintenance and turnaround manager for Shell, said that while she doesn't believe the measures organizations implemented to mitigate the pandemic like PPE and social distancing will be permanent, she expected that many of the lessons learned will.
"The No. 1 effect on us is the number of people we have on-site," Jefferson said. "With a turnaround, you have a significant increase in the number of people at the location, and the pandemic forced us to recognize that fewer people need to be present to get the job done."
This observation was shared by fellow panelist David Mason, director of reliability, maintenance and turnarounds for NOVA Chemicals.
"We've been challenged to figure out who actually needs to be on-site," he said. "Now, we see that many things can be done more effectively off-site. That has been a really good learning and taught us that we must manage our costs better."
Cost management is an especially critical factor for post-pandemic turnaround planning, as the bottom line has been increased in multiple ways.
Jefferson explained that her plant staggered its workers' times, but the knock-on effect of staggered times is an increased overall project duration. "Our turnaround scope increased from 10 days to 12 days, and that increased our costs," she noted.
In addition to cost increases resulting from expanded project durations, the lead times for materials and repairs have also increased.
"In some cases, we're finding that repaired parts are costing more and have longer lead times than purchasing new equipment," Jefferson said. She then added that some materials cost double what they did prior to 2020. As a result, she said, "We are starting to order more of our spare parts and keeping them in house." Like staggered worker times that increase project duration, stocking larger amounts of materials is also a substantive increase to a turnaround's bottom-line cost. "It is a risk to increase our material costs, but the reward is we keep productivity up," Jefferson explained.
The combination of decreased workers on-site and increased project durations and material costs has significantly impacted scope, but Mason claimed this isn't necessarily a net negative.
"Challenging scope is a good thing," he said. "This environment has forced us to be more critical and disciplined about what we accept to be in turnaround scope."
Perhaps the most long-lasting effect COVID-19 has had on turnarounds was forcing organizations to embrace digitization.
"The barrier to digitization has decreased," Mason said. "It's not that digitization has gotten better, although it has. Rather, it's that our own internal belief system has changed. We've seen how effective it can be to use Zoom or Microsoft Teams, so we're embracing digitization a lot more.
"There's going to be a huge push [toward digitization]. Those who are left behind in digitization won't survive. We have to figure out how we can do things differently."
In the end, Mason implored that the takeaway for turnaround managers should be to continue to communicate and share their collective lessons learned from the pandemic with each other through personal relationships with counterparts and through forums such as the panel on which he was participating.
"My belief is 'maintenance isn't secret.' We need to establish connections to each other and share our lessons learned," Mason said. "If we share what we've learned with each other, then we make our industry better and that makes all of us better. That result of the pandemic has been invaluable."
