Maintenance Turnarounds: Insights and Best Practices from Proudfoot’s 2019 TAR Survey

Executive Summary

In the world of maintenance, turnarounds may represent the biggest challenge on the biggest stage. All risks are heightened and all missteps amplified when small delays can mean millions in lost revenue. To ensure that your turnaround event will meet and surpass performance goals, it’s essential to have a precise and accurate understanding of how your organization is performing across key benchmarks and industry standards.

That’s why Proudfoot conducted our 2019 Global TAR survey: to understand the performance metrics and best practices from around the global fixed asset Shutdown, Turnaround, Outage (STO) community.  The results provide a rare view of TAR benchmarks and best practices based on perspectives from maintenance executives and turnaround managers from leading organizations.

Key Findings:

• 50% of companies don’t begin inspections until at least 75% of the way through the planned event duration
• 42% of companies aren’t properly leveraging a Risk Register, leading to lost time and decreased worker safety
• On average, companies are only allocating 10 months to plan for TAR events, well below best practice recommendations
• Only 43% of the time are work estimates based on historical performance benchmarks 
• 65% of respondents use Primavera, making it the dominant planning tool
• Most companies are on target with contingency budget planning

The results showed that the majority of respondents are approaching best practice with respect to setting contingency planning and productivity goals. A good rule of thumb is to reserve 5-10% of the budget for contingencies and most companies surveyed were at or near that range.  However, there should be a direct link between identifying potential risks in the planning phase and establishing an appropriate contingency budget. It’s important to look at each risk and major scope package on a granular level. Reference past performance as a good indicator for where your contingency may be placed before and during the event rather than throwing numbers at the problem.

Contact Proudfoot to request the full report and survey results

Request the full report to gain practical insights and best practices from maintenance leaders around the world covering a range of key topics, including:

Having partnered for decades with industry leading organizations to improve their TAR preparation, TAR execution, and Post-Turnaround Assessments, Proudfoot has a long track record of maximizing asset reliability while minimizing costs and risks associated with major maintenance events. Learn how Proudfoot helped a steel producer improve on-time delivery for one of their recent turnarounds by 15% in this ProofPoint.

Contact Proudfoot to request the full report on the survey results and schedule a meeting to discuss takeaways for improving maintenance turnaround performance for your operation.