Derksen Mechanical News

Operational shutdowns, turnarounds and outages (STO’s) can make a big impact, positively or negatively, on a business’ overall financial performance. Unlike many other projects, STO’s involve both planned and unplanned activities. Incorporating these unplanned activities efficiently into the schedule and scope of the STO is critical to meeting cost estimates and milestones in the timeline. That’s why having a strong, experienced STO manager can make all the difference.

Strong decision making abilities and quick troubleshooting skills are a basic requirement for an STO manager. Each new discovery requires immediate calculation of its effect on the timeline and cost estimate, in addition to communicating the additional work order to the work teams and suppliers related to its execution.

With employee turnover, even in leadership positions, a plant will not always have managers that have participated in their previous STO’s. That’s where the experience of an STO manager, like DMS, can be very helpful. In addition, we bring with us the knowledge and experience we’ve gained from many different sites, a broader base of experience than even your tenured employees will have. Broad experience and a broad perspective of the scope involved in the STO means a strong manager for this critical process in your business.

The complete Quality Statement of DMS can be read on our website, but in summary, every employee in our company is a part of and supports our quality control program, which is just as much about ‘improving’ our quality of workmanship, as it is about maintaining our current high standard.

There is not a single part of our company operations that is not affected by our commitment to quality assurance, and that includes our STO management services. We are committed to maintaining our service quality in an economical and expeditious manner with an emphasis on meeting or exceeding our client’s expectation. At DMS, we understand that quality workmanship is not in contrast to providing value-added work to our clients, we can, and are committed to, providing both.

Two key ingredients in our quality assurance program are ongoing training and open communication with all our employees, in areas of product improvement and performance integrity. This includes everyone from the top management on down. Communication is also a key ingredient in STO management; it is part of what makes DMS so effective in this area of our services.

At DMS, we have learned that there are several key components that are included in every successful shutdown, turnaround or planned outage. We’ve outlined them here in a list of ‘best practices’.

• Long-term planning – A comprehensive turnaround schedule should be in place for at least a five year period. This prevents lag time in the turnaround planning and integrates the scheduled turnaround into a company’s ongoing processes.
• Core team development – Along with the individual teams created to develop the turnaround schedule and plan, a lead team that has over-sight is critical to maintaining focus and holding individual teams accountable to the objectives set by plant leadership in all areas. The members of this team should include representatives from the mechanical contractor, as well as in-house leadership.
• Plan development – The core team, with the help of its sub-teams, develop the timeline estimate with milestones, beginning with pre-turnaround milestones. A preliminary cost estimate, man-power requirements and an organizational structure should be developed. A cost tracking and reporting process needs to be developed and an audit schedule for measuring progress. Hazardous operations should be identified and safety requirements established.
• Pre-turnaround – This stage is just as critical to success as the planning. Orientation of the maintenance contractor and training of the execution team takes place. The safety plan is implemented, material procurement takes place, temporary connections and offices are prepared, pre-fabrication and other pre-shutdown work is begun.
• Execution and Post-turnaround – Implementation of the plan is carried out and audit reporting done during the execution phase. Following the turnaround, demobilization and a turnaround review process should be planned for and followed through. This allows for assessment of lessons learned and recommendations for future turnarounds.

DMS offers a full spectrum of mechanical trades:

Pipefitting

• Welding
• Millwrights
• Boilermakers
• Ironworkers
• Insulators
• Crane Operators

Because of this, our clients have found that we are also a great labor resource for filling temporary in-house needs with highly skilled workers.
Whether the need is for a two week vacation, a one day holiday or a prolonged medical leave, having workers DMS can fill those gaps with labor that is fully qualified to step into the shoes of your employees.

By allowing vacancies during vacation, holidays, sick days or other causes of labor shortages, to be filled with skilled workers, our clients minimize the effect of these unavoidable fluctuations in manpower. Maintaining a constant workforce level can prevent slowdowns, which we all know, can be very costly when trying to keep projects on track.