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