Whether you call it a plant shutdown, outage, or turnaround getting the right work done, safely, and in the shortest time can be tricky.  Here are a few Lean Plant Shutdown Strategies we’ve taken that have helped make dramatic improvements in reducing planned and unplanned downtime:

Externalize – do nothing during the shutdown that can possibly be done while the process is running

• SMED 101 – separate internal from external
• Staging supplies – no ‘treasure hunts’
• Prepare tool fixtures
• Prepare work areas
• Dry run, dress rehearsal, walk through, simulations
• Checklists

 

Constraint Busting – find the constraint(s) and exploit/subordinate/elevate

• Work scope scrubs – select work base on probability of failure and risk impact
• Schedule scrubs – eliminate, combine, rearrange, simplify

 

Shutdown & Start Up – making the plant ready for maintenance work

• Checklists
• Dry run & simulations
• Labor plans
• Safety permits – lockout tag out efficiently
• Parallel teams, chase the rabbit

 

Parallel Planning – bust organizational silos with concurrent cross functional teams

• Work scope and schedule iterations and scrubs
• Risk-based work selection
• Contractor work reviews
• Dry run dress rehearsals

 

Non Stop Critical Path – understand the trade offs when applying additional labor

• Separate man and machine – machine based operations never stop (welding, blasting), man based operations suffer fatigue (demolition, fabricating)
• Overlapping shifts
• Relief crews
• Runners, spotters, observers

 

Milestone Reporting – what gets measured get better

• Categorize activities
• Sequence prerequisites
• plan vs actual
• deviation, root cause, and countermeasures

 

Scope Change Management – unplanned work is a failure of planning or reliability engineering

• Scope freeze, scope change cutoff
• Single point of authority to add/drop/change scope
• Risk-based decision making on ‘found’ or ‘discovered’ work
• Cost and duration offsets
• Post shutdown root cause analysis and corrective action

 

Command Center – transparency

• The Plan is available for all, and easy to understand
• Status of all work is easy and quick – exceptions, deviations stand out
• Missing or stale information is obvious, as is who is responsible
• Information ownership, source, and ‘freshness’ is easy to see
• Deviations have countermeasures clearly displayed
• Information updated before/after not during meetings
• When the critical path change inevitably happens, new plan is in place in minutes not hours

 

Management Controls – inspect what you expect if you want to sustain

• Preparation reviews
• Gemba walks and paired observations
• Site inspections
• Checklist reviews
• Performance metrics and countermeasures

 

After Action Review – no shutdown is flawless; learn and improve

• What was the plan and what actually happened?
• What went well?  What went wrong?
• Separate common from special cause
• Find solutions for common cause, buffer risks for special cause