Skip to main content

Articles in Category: Turnarounds

Are Resource Codes Helpful In a Turnaround Schedule? Yes!

Often on a Turnaround, or any large project, you need to report resource availability and requirements in your schedule by Craft (trade) and Company. But often, that’s not how the resource dictionary hierarchy is set up. How do we solve this problem? Well, an easy solution to the reporting requirement is using resource codes.

TAPS for Suncor Energy

Updating schedules is a crucial part of any successful business, but that doesn't mean it isn't a frustrating task. Manually entering data can be exhausting and mind-numbing, not to mention costly and just very time-consuming all-around. When Suncor Energy approached Emerald Associates, desperate for some kind of alternative to the dreaded task of updating schedules, we were happy to help.

For Suncor, manually updating schedules was just not working. It was too slow and not nearly accurate enough to suit their needs. That's where TAPS came in.

P6-Reporter Self-Serve Dashboards for Turnarounds

Does your turnaround self-serve dashboard(s) display easy to digest information on your turnaround’s current status? Does your team know where to look and what to look for to stay updated on progress?

If you’re still building your green up reports using Excel, there’s an easier way.

Client Experiences #1 - Massive Upgrade

When I first started working with our new client, I started out as a general trainer for the company’s employees. Our work began with typical P6 stuff, nothing new or especially exciting, but it was the start of a longer, more involved relationship with our client. I started helping them with turnarounds back in 2013 and I've been doing turnarounds with them every year since. I recently finished my 6th turnaround with the company - an 11-12 week long process that honestly felt a lot longer than it was. Due to a problem organizing the order of units, we ran overtime, and that was unfortunately just one of the many issues we had to deal with during that turnaround.

As is often the case, a good amount of the complications we faced were unintentionally self-inflicted. Our client runs under an alliance contract umbrella with another organization that controls their project management and general processes. This organization had decided to do a major upgrade to P6 just a few weeks ahead of the turnaround execution. This naturally caused a lot of complications, as the workers involved in the turnaround had to do a lot of scrambling to figure out the bugs in the untested upgrades while simultaneously dealing with the turnaround itself, which was no easy task. On top of this, the upgrade to P6 wasn't just a standard upgrade - it was a move from version 6.2 to version 17, which is a big jump on any given day, but right before a turnaround... It was disastrous. There were all sorts of issues, including considerable trouble upon first-log in, and it created a lot of stress - way more than even on the typical turnaround! Units were in shutdown, people were pulling 12 and a half hour long shifts, the site was an hour away from where most of the personnel were stationed, IT issues were causing immense frustration - it seemed like everything that could go wrong did.

Now, I've been in quite a few panicked, rushed environments over my 8 years of turnaround assistance, and this could easily have been one of them, but luckily the majority of the schedulers dealt with it very well, keeping their heads despite the setbacks we faced. And as for me - I went in with my usual mentality: get it done. So despite the constant uphill battle, we managed to pull everything together and get through the turnaround with our sanity intact. Overall, it wasn't the easiest turnaround I've ever been a part of, but complications are part of the job, and I'm happy to say that another yearly turnaround with our client went by successfully - if maybe a little bumpier than usual!

EP-Dashboard - Tracking Found Work on Turnarounds Made Easy

While working on a turnaround project where our client was using our EP-datawarehouse and EP-dashboard tools for the first time, we were already showing them green up reports, inspection summary reports, performance curves and productivity curves, but had been tweaking them to fit their needs during the turnaround, which was quite beneficial to their team.

I was providing assistance to the turnaround team and started entering Additional Work Requests (AWR’s) as they came in from the AWR manager. The process required several steps during its life and we found a dashboard would be helpful in keeping track of the process, since we were getting questions about where AWR's were in the process. An AWR entered the process when it was received from the field personnel, assigned a number and entered into a master spreadsheet by the AWR manager. The spreadsheet listed several pieces of information, but the information we needed for the dashboard was the AWR#, Date Submitted, Approval Status, and the Description.

Are Resource Codes Helpful In a Turnaround Schedule? Yes!

Using Resource Codes has been very helpful on many Turnarounds. Often on a Turnaround (or any large project) you need to report resource availability and requirements in your schedule by Craft (trade) and Company.

But that is often not the way the resource dictionary hierarchy is set up? And you likely are not able to do anything about that since the Administrator probably controls that.