Refinery turnaround oil and gas

WHITEPAPERREFINING TURNAROUNDS
IN THE OIL AND GAS
INDUSTRY
OPTIMIZING PLANNING AND EXECUTION OF REFINERY
TURNAROUNDS WITH AGILE SOFTWARE SUPPORT
HIGHLIGHTS
Complexities encountered
during planning and execution
of a turnaround can cost
millions of dollars in downtime.
Refinery planners need agile
software support to dynamically
adapt and replan once a
turnaround begins.
IFS Operational Planning
Board™
and IFS Applications™
bridge the gap between
planning and execution,
enabling refineries to increase
turnaround efficiency.
P1 P3 P4
March, 2016
Patrick Zirnhelt, Vice President of Enterprise Service & Asset Management,
IFS North America
Hege Wroldsen, Managing Director of the IFS Center of Excellence for Oil & Gas

CONTENT
THE TICKING CLOCK..................................................................................................... 1
The complexities reviewed—establishing a single point of truth.......................................1
THE WORKFORCE......................................................................................................... 2
The pressure cooker effect..............................................................................................2
A possible ‘Pandora’s Box’..............................................................................................2
The inadequacies of current IT systems to meet these challenges...................................3
INTRODUCING IFS OPERATIONAL PLANNING BOARD™
AND IFS APPLICATIONS™
............ 4
First the planning….........................................................................................................4
…then dynamic re-planning ............................................................................................4
PLANNERS IN THE DRIVING SEAT—EASE OF USE........................................................... 5
Achieving increased wrench time—the operational uptime end-goal................................5
REFINING FUTURE TURNAROUNDS................................................................................ 5
ABOUT IFS................................................................................................................... 7

1
REFINING TURNAROUNDS IN THE OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY
Turnarounds are a necessity in the refining industry. They are huge, expensive
undertakings, affecting hundreds of processes and thousands of people both inside
and outside the refinery walls. Careful planning, organization and adaptation are
key to ensuring success.
THE TICKING CLOCK
Turnarounds are not new considerations for refineries in the oil and gas sector,
but the bottom-line always remains the same—an inefficient turnaround means
dollars lost. One plant estimated the cost of a turnaround at $10 million per
day.
The recent fall in oil prices has added increasing pressure to find cost-
savings for refineries. Cost control has never been more closely scrutinized,
and project management for turnarounds has become even more critical to
bottom-line success.
The moment operations cease, time becomes money. The end goal is, of
course, to get operations up and running in the shortest possible time, but with
health and safety standards intact.
The majority of savings can be found by driving efficiency, but real efficiencies
can only be achieved by careful asset and workforce management at all stages
of what is a complex and continuous process. The ability of the enterprise
resource planning (ERP) or enterprise asset management (EAM) system to be
agile and flexible enough to deal with these complexities is crucial to realizing
the efficiencies that can be achieved.
The complexities reviewed—establishing a single point of truth
There is no ‘one size fits all’ plan to facilitate turnaround. Planning is a dynamic
event—it’s a continuous task that requires re-thinking and re-scheduling, even
after the process begins.
The beginning of the planning problem lies in the complex nature of oil
and gas refineries—more specifically the vast amount of data streams being fed
into the ERP or EAM system. These data streams could be coming from
various platforms such as Microsoft®
Excel®
spreadsheets, database programs
or other third-party software.
REFINING TURNAROUNDS IN THE OIL AND GAS
INDUSTRY
Complexities encountered
during planning and
execution of a turnaround
can cost millions of dollars
in downtime.

2
Consolidation of data is
needed from contractors,
multiple systems and
applications to feed into
the refinery planner’s
operations to give planners
an accurate, single point
of truth.
Then, many refineries run a number of separate IT systems to control the
overall turnaround process that are not integrated or aligned. This makes it
difficult to control and report on project deliverables— from engineering
specifications to commissioning, all of which must include health and safety
and risk perspectives.
Establishing an overall ‘single point of truth’ to plan a turnaround becomes
very difficult when data exists in such varying formats and comes from different
IT systems. This disjointed feedback of data makes actual planning difficult,
resulting in an elongated lead time ahead of any turnaround. ERP and EAM
solutions must be able to integrate all this data to provide the information
necessary to plan effectively—because there are more complexities to take into
account.
THE WORKFORCE
The next layer of complexity comes in the form of workforce scheduling and
management. The scale of turnarounds requires coordinating thousands of
people inside and outside refinery walls. This includes workforce scheduling
for external contractors that come with their own work schedule requirements
and roadmaps, and the subsequent effect that can have on an organization’s
own staff.
Planners need to project how many people are required to complete a turn-
around in a set time period, but this depends on many workforce factors from
suitability to availability. Consolidation of data is needed from contractors,
multiple systems and applications to feed into the refinery planner’s operations
to give planners an accurate, single point of truth.
This should then feed back into the project program, consolidating progress,
cost and changes to measure against an execution plan.
The pressure cooker effect
The scope of a turnaround can become stressed in the window before execution
—demands begin to conflict as everyone tries to optimize that time period. So
many sub-contractors and refinery personnel want to maximize the window of
opportunity and are working to tight deadlines, but all with different agendas,
creating a ‘pressure cooker’ situation. Agile software support is required to
minimize conflict and release that pressure.
A possible ‘Pandora’s Box’
During a turnaround, organizations are working in a ‘time box’, so material
planning, work orders and resource planning need synchronizing before, and

3
Refinery planners need
agile software support to
dynamically adapt and
replan once a turnaround
begins.
updating once, the process begins. Planners decide the time window to
complete the schedule of work, and the material, work orders and resources
required to optimize execution.
Personnel will have a work order to perform maintenance on a particular
piece of machinery. The long lead times required are due to the complexity of
the machinery that requires maintenance, so from a material point of view, all
possible parts and new equipment need to be procured beforehand.
But of course, during execution of the turnaround, organizations run the
risk of opening ‘Pandora’s box’ on a piece of equipment. There could be a
number of unforeseen problems with the machinery that require further engineer
expertise, or even new health and safety considerations. This generates sub-
sequent work orders which need to be scheduled, having a knock-on effect to
the whole turnaround process.
The complexity of all this revised data being fed back and forth between
fragmented IT systems makes it impossible to provide a planner with a real-
time point of the truth during execution.
All these factors carry the threat of extremely high revenue loss due to inef-
ficiency during the time the refinery spends offline. Add to this third-party
contractors who will always introduce their own roadmaps and systems, not
aligned with the refinery planner’s, and it can be seen that integrating these
fragmented systems can become very complex and costly.
The inadequacies of current IT systems to meet these challenges
Some refineries are using an integration of third-party tools and existing ERP
and EAM software to plan turnarounds, while other organizations are using
simple project planning tools.
The issue with these tools is that they are simply static project planning
tools—long lists produced by systems that can immediately become out of
date before they are used. Unanticipated problems are routinely found during
machinery maintenance, for example, causing delays and requiring new calcu-
lations to the planner’s original schedule. Starting with an incorrect ‘picture’
of the planning stages of a turnaround will only become exacerbated during
execution as problems arise and plans deviate.
The maintenance plan might be located in a Microsoft Excel or Primavera
document, whereas purchasing orders and inventory are handled in the ERP
system. Companies are now relying on print-outs and the brain power of
planners to coordinate changes, opening the way for potential errors and
delays.

4
IFS Operational Planning
Board™
and IFS
Applications™
bridge the
gap between planning and
execution, enabling
refineries to increase
turnaround efficiency.
INTRODUCING IFS OPERATIONAL PLANNING BOARD™
AND
IFS APPLICATIONS™
The execution of a turnaround with integrated third-party systems is very
cumbersome and document-driven, without taking advantages of newer,
database-driven techniques and data-sharing. They provide no real tool to
synchronize project work and pre/post maintenance work.
Refinery planners need a system that supports them during both the
planning and execution phase of a turnaround. These systems need the agility
to adapt and replan to minimize downtime caused by unexpected changes to
the existing schedule.
First the planning…
Drawing on its expertise with customers in the oil and gas industry, IFS has
developed an operational planning tool, IFS Operational Planning Board (OPB),
alongside IFS Applications developed specifically to help companies optimize
turnaround processes by effectively bridging the planning and execution stages.
OPB analyzes key variables such as equipment structure, work orders,
preventive maintenance plan, and the availability of staff, materials and tools,
to produce an optimal plan for a turnaround. Linked seamlessly with the EAM
application, it identifies potentially critical situations requiring action and
enables planners to produce work orders that can be immediately executed
with the resources available. IFS OPB visualizes planned downtime together
with planned maintenance. It also allows for the sourcing of staff, materials
and equipment necessary for specialized maintenance activities, well ahead of
execution.
…then dynamic re-planning
Planners are required to carry out their jobs in a pressurized and highly dynamic
environment. As profitability depends on minimizing downtime, outages need
to be as brief as possible and carefully managed.
IFS OPB and IFS Applications enhance the planning and execution process
by uniting all the variables into a single solution, making it easier to respond to
changes in the turnaround— and to identify potential roadblocks. IFS provides
a suite of fully integrated functions including OPB, work order management,
mobility support, built-in document management and more. The solution is
user-friendly, allowing planners to customize how they see planning actions,
create different load options, and gain a quick overview of planning status.
IFS OPB relies on a powerful scheduling engine to manage the vast number
of staff and contractors onsite at any given time during a turnaround. It
simultaneously analyzes the plan, equipment structure, current and pending
work orders and the availability of tools and equipment.

5
IFS OPB is easy to use.
The interface allows for an
enhanced overview of the
alignment of operations in
the short, medium, and
long term.
Planners can clearly see when maintenance should start and finish, what
resources are available, and how critical each issue is. If work orders cannot be
executed with the existing resources, planners are alerted and able to immedi-
ately take action to rectify this. Once a planner has made changes to the board,
these are integrated into IFS Applications with corrected work orders scheduled
and communicated to engineers.
PLANNERS IN THE DRIVING SEAT—EASE OF USE
IFS OPB is easy to use. The interface allows for an enhanced overview of the
alignment of operations in the short, medium, and long term. Being able to
simulate different mixes of finite and infinite resources, and visualize their
effect, gives operations and maintenance the ability to react to changes before
and during a turnaround. Users can choose which planning criteria are loaded,
customize how they view planning data, and get an instant overview of the
planning situation.
Achieving increased wrench time—the operational uptime end-goal
IFS OBP and IFS Applications don’t just come into their own during turn-
arounds. A key strength of IFS OPB and IFS Applications is the level of
efficiency they bring to conducting routine maintenance.
Operators aspire to high levels of ‘wrench time’, i.e. the amount of time
that maintenance personnel spend actually carrying out maintenance as opposed
to chasing materials and equipment. It’s not uncommon for personnel to be
issued with a work order, only to find that the materials needed are not in
stock or onsite. IFS OPB ensures that work orders are not issued without the
necessary materials and resources at hand. If a maintenance engineer is assigned
a task, he or she will be able to complete it.
Increased wrench time means more proactive and efficient maintenance
during day-to-day refinery operations. The dividends of this can be realized
during turnarounds, reducing the amount of time engineers need to spend
turning around equipment. The equipment has been well maintained during
operations, limiting the time refineries spend offstream.
REFINING FUTURE TURNAROUNDS
There is now a new generation of software that is enabling planners to
effectively optimize turnarounds with a solution that bridges both planning
and execution, while integrating asset management. This brings together all the
variables involved into a single solution, making it easier for planners to manage
and adapt in a dynamic execution environment.

6
With software such as IFS OPB and IFS Applications, planners can respond to
changing maintenance tasks in real time, working around delays or faulty
parts. It can save refineries money by streamlining a turnaround, enabling
operations to begin again as quickly as possible.
Looking further forward, this new breed of integrated software will enable
a more proactive approach to maintenance while refineries are operational,
reducing the amount of maintenance required during the turnaround process
in the long-term.
All this feeds back into increased wrench time and greater efficiency.
Getting operations back up to speed as quickly as possible is paramount.
Refinery planners need software that supports them before, during and after a
turnaround—or face being caught flat-footed and a costly bill of $10m a day!
PATRICK ZIRNHELT
As Vice President of Enterprise Service and Asset Management for IFS North America,
Patrick Zirnhelt is responsible for the organization’s strategy, development, and
execution in asset intensive industries.
Patrick works closely with the global Center of Excellence for Oil and Gas to manage
pursuits on new customer acquisition, develop marketing messaging, partner relation-
ships, and identify new business development opportunities.
With more than 20 years of information management experience, including enter-
prise software implementation, development and training, Patrick is well versed in the
challenges facing service and asset intensive organizations. He has served on the IFS
advisory council for enterprise asset management, assisting in the strategy for research
and development of IFS Applications.
Patrick holds a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Queens University, and
an MBA focused on MIS Strategic Management and Marketing from York University—
Schulich School of Business.
HEGE WROLDSEN
Hege Wroldsen has been working in the IT industry since 1998, with a continuous focus
on the project and service & asset management solution areas specifically within the
oil & gas sector. She has held positions in IBM, among them responsible for sales &
marketing of IBM Maximo Enterprise Asset Management in Norway, and as Global Account
Director for Statoil at SAP. Hege has been with the company since 2009 working with
asset intensive industries. She holds a BA in International Business from the University
of San Francisco, California, and an MBA from Henley Management College in the UK.

En3267-1Production:IFSCorporateMarketing,March2016.
www.IFSWORLD.com
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