During pre-turnaround inspection planning, several critical elements must be identified and defined. First, a list of all of the areas and equipment that are tagged for inspection should be produced. Second, the planned inspection activities to be performed should be identified in detail, and a specific methodology should be assigned to each. At this time, all relevant inspection and testing disciplines that are anticipated to fully evaluate all of the equipment to be inspected need to be listed and appropriate NDT applications need to be designated.

​

Inspection scheduling is critical to executing an efficient turnaround. For the most optimized inspection schedule, it’s good to use a consecutive scheduling plan rather than an aggregated schedule. An aggregated plan is when everyone is brought onto the project at the same time. A consecutive schedule, on the other hand, is where personnel are only brought in when they are needed. This saves an operator both time and money.

​

The final part of turnaround planning involves deciding on the budget. To create a budget, each group: maintenance, operations, and engineering, all submit lists of things they need to do. These lists are then combined into a thorough and comprehensive turnaround list. The difficult part about budgeting is that all these groups compete for limited budget and submit different plans for the same equipment. To compile an efficient list, it is important to know what needs to be done, how it needs to get done, and how doing it will affect adjacent units or pieces of equipment. It’s important to be as thorough as possible when creating this list because additions to the list after the planning phase are generally frowned upon. Although in most cases, they are inevitable.

​

The Benefits of Turnaround Planning

 

Proper turnaround planning is integral to making sure that the turnaround inspection goes as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Turnarounds that have not been adequately planned can easily run over budget and behind schedule as new work is discovered, equipment needs to be prepared, and inadequate numbers of personnel struggle to keep up with the workload.

​

How Sentinel Does Turnaround Planning

 

Sentinel Integrity provides Turnaround Planning solutions as part of our comprehensive turnaround services. We can provide qualified and experienced personnel to augment the resources available to handle turnaround planning and scheduling, manage the turnaround activities, and assist in the startup of the facility to minimize time offline.