Advancing Asset Management Maturity at Cadent Gas
Explore the concept of Asset Management maturity and its impact on organisational success in this insightful case study post.
Optimizing shutdown intervals yields significant savings
SABIC Innovative Plastic’s management realised that their shutdown strategy was incurring high costs and downtime losses, and subsequent system instabilities which was compounded by an increasingly competitive market.
Route to 4-year turnaround interval identified & justified (200% turnaround interval improvement)
Net Sabic Bergen op Zoom benefits calculated as a direct cost saving of $USD 11.4M
Up to an additional $USD 42.3M savings in production output efficiencies
Contract Objectives
SABIC Innovative Plastics (SABIC IP) is part of the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation and has four polycarbonate production facilities in Europe and the USA. Each site had a scheduled annual or bi-annual shut down for inspections, maintenance and engineering projects. Following a review of possible processes and available tools, the management team decided to partner with The Woodhouse Partnership to carry out a Shutdown Optimisation Project across the four sites, with the first site being Bergen op Zoom, The Netherlands. The project received senior management support with the goal to significantly reduce costs and improve performance.
Activity Description
Woodhouse deployed the ‘Criticality Method calibration’ to assess the impact and potential urgency of each task that appeared to require a shutdown of the plant. These were then challenged and filtered down to a list of truly shutdown-dependent activities, each was evaluated individually, and then collectively, using DST™ software tools for optimal timing and ‘bundling’.
The first step in the process was to select, from the entire workload, only those tasks which truly drive the requirement to shut down the plant. This was achieved through a series of screening and filtering processes. The selective filters ranged from simple rule-based screening to assessment and challenge by multidisciplinary teams. From a total of 24,260 tasks, 7,875 were listed as ‘shutdown dependent’ yet only 86 were actually found to be truly shutdown dependent.
Following the individual task analysis, many revealed optimal intervals equal to, or greater than a 4 year ‘ideal target’ interval. Others, however, showed optimal intervals which were less than 4 years – representing ‘bottlenecks’ to the achievement of longer shutdown intervals. The next step was to assess the best way of combining tasks with different optimal intervals into the ‘least compromise’ groupings and shared timings.
DST™ SCHEDULE software tool was employed. This module explores the effects of moving individual tasks away from their optima to share downtime or other bundling advantages with other tasks. SCHEDULE does this in “real-time” in just a few minutes by utilizing a self-learning “genetic algorithm”; normal simulation techniques would take around 4 weeks to ‘solve’ the optimal scheduling of just 10 tasks. There were 32 cost/risk and timing-sensitive tasks carried forward to this ‘optimal bundling and scheduling’ stage.
The results show that there were a number of tasks that still required and justified a frequent (annual or biannual) shutdown. The next step was therefore to “de-bottleneck” or remove the requirement for these high-frequency shutdown-dependent tasks. Having identified the de-bottlenecking tasks and removed them from the task list, the SCHEDULE analysis was re-calculated.
Contract Project Outcomes
The project revealed that the optimum shutdown interval is now 4 years. The DST™ SCHEDULE outputs included a full NPV calculation of the costs, risks and production impact of this program (and any alternative). The full impact of the changes was directly quantifiable – and represented 7- figure annualized net benefits. With the sensitivity testing already built-in, and full drill-down clarity regarding the urgency and justification for each shutdown, SABIC senior management was able to commit to the revised plan very rapidly; all de-bottlenecking actions were approved and underway within 2 months of the study.
The Bergen op Zoom site implemented a new, 4-yearly shutdown cycle which, when left unchallenged, shutdowns and their intervals become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Where this is the case, the organization’s business processes have evolved in order to support the pattern, concentrating on efficient delivery of the work rather than challenging its need and timing.
Challenging the shutdown dependency of any task is essential, but can only be successfully done by competent multidisciplinary teams and full cost/risk appraisal, with appropriate decision support tools and robust methods for coping with the inevitable uncertainties and poor information. As with all change programs the participation of all stakeholders was crucial. In particular, the safety-critical areas of inspection and Process Safety Management (PSM) were vital participants in the study. The structured range estimating and sensitivity analysis techniques were also major factors in obtaining the confidence and credibility of the analysis results.
Net Sabic Bergen op Zoom benefits are calculated as
- as $USD 11.4M indirect cost savings alone with an additional $USD 24M to 42.3M in production output efficiencies (at 40%-100% production rates)
- requires only small plant changes & spares purchasing
12 actions were required with total c.€ 250k investment (NB 5 actions have minimal/no cost at all)
- Very many tasks were eliminated from the TAR scope (e.g. 22% in Chlorine unit)
- Continuous Turnaround Optimization process established with DST Tools embedded in Operational Excellence process steps.
Learning points – human factors & resourcing
- Stop the legacy culture of automatically assigning tasks to next turnaround
- New planning process required to take advantage of unexpected shutdowns
- Changed daily/online inspections & maintenance manhours
- Attitude change triggered by asking the right questions
- Turnaround optimization is not a 1-off exercise: it initiates, then becomes part of, the continuous Operational Maintenance process
Additional Benefits
- Opportunities to improve work effectiveness identified
- CMMS (Asset Maintenance) task lists identified as needing serious review
- A structured review of underlying degradation problems triggers lateral thinking solutions (e.g. avoiding Turnaround tasks)
The Woodhouse Partnership would be delighted to show you how the SALVO process and Decision Support Tools™ can be implemented to benefit your business, contact us now for a free initial consultation. We look forward to hearing from you.
“In the area of turnaround management optimization and aged assets assessment, The Woodhouse Partnership has been of tremendous help to move from qualitative, emotional and subjective statements, to solid analysis using a mix of real data and tacit knowledge, to support our asset strategy decisions.”
John Bruijnooge,
Former Director Technical Services, SABIC
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