What to Do When Your Plant Shuts Down

Yeap! All sounds good but it also dependant on how well coupled the manpower team are before such PM's start it. As you know with so much outsourcing and lay-off's these days is kind of rough to plan something like this witout the main assest allset first. Then how well the team are working together in harmony without the -Bully- factor in the way. Then from there the other dilema will be who is going to be the leader or how many leaders are going to be for the crew to follows, who know's?

Is a -Murphy Law- scenario most of the time everywhere I'd been, same kind of set-backs always. No matter how good you tried someone are never happy with the accomplished for what ever the reasons. Most of the time the alter their own procedures and planned schedules and rules of the games in the last minute when the task is about to be done completed. I don't know! A lot of time also the tools of the trade don't even working wrigth at the moment of true. Then you have a lot of people that they came in to supposely perform the task in question from start to finish but in the middle of the operations they start feeling mad out of the blues and start complaining of every single dumb thing all over the place in rush. That's very annoyance too. At last then when whatever the task are at the end of the operation everyone wants to get the H... out and left a mess of things behind out of place all over the place, that frustrating as well. Definetly dissapointment absolutly...Any way remember 'Lock and Tag' that puppy out for safety and get all the paperwork and PPE before begin the jobs. And easy does it no rush into nothing now, SShhhSSShh SShh!

MC

Most manufacturing plants in the South Eastern U.S. stopped scheduling maintenance shutdowns or at least the ones I've worked at. They run full tilt until the production line shuts it self down which it will do if not properly maintained. Then you try to cram in as many projects as you can which turns out to be a train wreck in progress where you don't accomplish your planned scope of work and wind up over budget.

I would love to have planned shut downs instead of short notice 4 or 5 day weekends. I'm sure maintenance and the process engineers would as well.

The first principle is to make best use of available down time. Remember that product only flows as a result of up time. Down time cost money, even if no maintenance work is done. Therefore, good use of unexpected down time is essential, because otherwise down time must be planned and scheduled to repair equipment items that can only be repaired when not running. If done correctly, available up time will improve and overall maintenance cost will be reduced.

Second, only repair what would otherwise need to be repaired before the next planned downtime. Don't overhaul what doesn't need overhaul, but do predict when an equipment item will need to be overhauled based on its repair history, and perform the repair during an unexpected outage prior to when the overhaul would be needed. A good rule of thumb is that when 50% to 75% of the time between predicted repairs has been used, then repair the item at the next opportunity.

Third, keep an accurate repair history on each and every equipment item so that you know the mean time to failure for each component of each item. Several databases are available, some for free, that provide failure rates for different classes of equipment; however, because each plant environment is unique, developing your own data and using it is better. If you have the capability, I recommend that you use fault tree analysis to determine root cause and failure mechanisms. That way you will not spend much time fixing what is not broken or is unlikely to fail.

Pre-planning for short duration plant outages is essential.

It an item is repaired or modified, it must be tested before it is certified as ready for operation - no exceptions. Operstions, technocal, and maintenance people should all agree on the post maintenance test procedures as being necessary and sufficient.

When I was the plant manager of a large chemical plant, I insisted that my maintenance and technical engineers preplan the work and manpower requirements for plant outages of 3, 5, 10, and 15 days duration. When the plant shutdown unexpectedly, I would estimate the outage duration and based on the critical path to repair the equipment that failed, then we would execute the preplanned maintenance tasks that would fit within the outage window of the critical path job(s).

I found it beneficial to pre assemble shutdown repair kits for each equipment item. Each kit would contain the spare parts required for overhaul, written repair plans and instructions, vendor contacts, a kit inventory list, equipment drawings, post maintenance test procedures, and any other things qnique to the equipment item. The repair kits are rebuilt following every use and are inventoried once a quarter to be certain everything was in the kit.

And last, you will not always be right in either what caused the unplanned outage, how hong the primary pepair will take, or which pre-planned maintenance tasks to implement, but with a little practice you will get very good at it and you maintenance effectiveness will improve.

Hope this helps. FYI when we folowed the program outlined above our onstream time improved from 88.5% to 97.2% in a world scale, continuous, single line chemical plant. That is a lot of product that would otherwise not have been produced.