With plant turnarounds requiring significant resources to plan and execute, there are many factors to take into consideration. The pandemic magnified some of the issues in this space and challenges still exist today, making it important to implement best practices that will enable success. In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Mike Aughenbaugh, associate target market manager for Swagelok, explains the evolution of turnarounds as a result of the pandemic and best practices that can enable improved processes.
Below is the transcript of the podcast:
PS: Maybe we can start with you telling us a little bit about yourself, and especially some projects that you're working on with Swagelok.
MA: Sure, I've actually been with Swagelok for almost 20 years now, and 18 of the last 20 years I was out in what we call our channel, which is our sales and service centers. And only in the last year and a half I've actually been at corporate based out of Solon, OH. I've been in a ton of different roles. I actually started out my career in customer service and warehousing and custom fabrication and all the other tasks, and then went into outside sales calling mostly on refineries, and oil & gas customers.
PS: And some of the projects that you're currently working on in that capacity?
MA: We do a lot of research on the marketing side of the business. We look a lot at industry trends, we talk a lot with other industry experts that are out there, we go to a lot of trade shows of course. And then we do a lot of projections on where business is going in the world, and what are the type of projects that they work on. We look specifically on a lot of upstream projects that are occurring right now, and where those are going to ultimately end up.
PS: Let's dive right into the topic of turnaround best practices. One of the things that I noted in doing some research on this topic is that COVID had a significant impact on our industry's ability to conduct regular scheduled turnarounds. Could you tell us about some of the hurdles that we've overcome since that period, and maybe some of the challenges you're seeing out there.
MA: Oh yeah, I was at the front lines of this stuff too, and a lot of COVID work was going on and a lot of turnarounds were happening. It was really a stressful time for vendors out there, because the whole world flipped upon itself and supply chain was no different. What hasn't changed is that the focus is still on large equipment, large projects, critical paths, things like that.
But really, what changed is that because a lot of people were remote, most of the projects folks were remote, too, so it was really difficult to collaborate with them on some of the things that they were working on. Vendor access was restricted, so we didn't get to communicate with a lot of people on-site anymore. Some of the real, more detailed things that we dealt with is that a lot of exotic alloys, especially around those supply chains, were very difficult. Even on some standard carbon steel, we were having some issues with that.
Things were very difficult to obtain in a timely manner. There were a lot of material surprises, so last-minute shipping changes would occur. Labor was very scarce, and even with labor being scarce, people were socially distancing, so project teams could have to be separated, and there weren't as many of them out there.
Post-COVID, I think we learned a lot of things, and that's really what's driving a lot of the change that you see now. More detailed procurement strategies are one of them, where they're not just concerned about the big equipment coming in and the high dollar items, they're worried about a lot of the ancillary products that go along with those larger product implementations and those critical paths.
The on-site accumulation of materials happens earlier too. In the past they would have an area for the big equipment to go to and then they would reach out to the vendor when they needed their things a couple of weeks in advance. Now they're staging things earlier, so you may find a pallet of equipment or materials or widget that are sitting there 6-7 months in advance of when they actually need them, and that's been a big change.
Also, full product project usages are now essential instead of spot purchases, so they're looking at the totality of those items that they need as opposed to splitting that up into smaller purchase orders. All in all, the trend is for more detailed looks at everything that they're doing and that's a big change for our customers.
Some of the challenges that still remain is that labor is going to continue to be an issue. Some of the trends we see revolve around third parties to fulfill historical on-site labor. That's not going to change and this is placing pressures on vendors and third parties to do more on-site services, calling up those specialized vendors to perform things that they may have done in the past with on-site labor. Some of these can be things like material takeoffs, asking the vendor to come in and actually do a count of what they need for them, or going out and finding defects where you're going after defect elimination, identification of those assets. Inventory management would be one of the final things that you would commonly see change now because of post-COVID.
PS: Mike, I've seen a presentation that you delivered on this topic before, outlining 7 tips for effective plant turnarounds. Given the successes you describe, where people are changing with the times, but also that there are some opportunities still out there, what are some of those best practices that you would say plant teams should target when they're going to plan and conduct their turnarounds this year?
MA: Number one has to be engage early with your suppliers. When we first started talking about effective plant turnarounds, I was always trying to get end users to engage early with vendors, and really I think COVID really put that into hyperdrive. A lot of the supply chain issues, particularly on things that are not bread and butter items for a lot of those suppliers, there's definitely there's always going to be supply chain issues now, so that really affected things. Exotic alloys, for example, is a perfect one, right? A lot of things going on in project improvements are going to be things like metallurgical upgrades to their systems, and a lot of those metallurgies can cause issues if you are expecting them to have the same type of deliveries as standard stainless steel or carbon steel, for example.
So really, just engage with their vendors very, very early on, and what I mean by very early on is when you're in the actual planning stages of that project, that's when you should be reaching out to your vendors and asking for assistance, not for when the project has already been designed and now you need to start talking about individual part numbers.
Another one, this is going to be huge and is going to be elevated by labor shortages, is go after prefabricated assemblies. A lot of times facilities will want to update things, such as grab sampling systems or seal flush assemblies or gas distribution. These are all customized things that generally you would hand over to an engineering house to put together a design of it, and then they would hand it off to a contractor or someone else to fix. Engaging those vendors early, making that its own part number, is just going to eliminate or reduce the amount of hours that you need to install that component. Now instead of spending all your time on the details of individual fittings, for example, now you can just order that one panel and install it and it will really speed up and lessen your cost.
The final thing is going to be on quality control, and I don't mean quality control in terms of vendor pieces and parts. I'm thinking more about the quality of labor that you have on site. One of the trends we see with refining and chemical plants, for example, is that a lot more of their labor is coming from outside of the facility. With that, you're going to have a lot of variation in the quality of the systems that eventually you as an owner operator are going to be taking over – those systems are going to become yours once that project is over.
PS: A lot of that sounds like some very sensible upfront work that perhaps plants in more reactive mode may have trouble adjusting to, but which really do pay off in the long run.
MA: Yeah, absolutely.
PS: The proof is often in the application, and there were a couple of case studies that were in that presentation too, so let’s talk about some of those. There was a major oil company that was mentioned as having improved their system performance. Can you talk about that?
MA: Manufacturing companies in general, there's always going to be a bunch that view them as just a manufacturing company, right? They make widgets, and those widgets get installed. You go back to turnarounds, even nowadays I think essentially a manufacturer would provide a list of materials to complete a project, and that site would use personnel exclusively to identify, plan, and execute that project. But I think things have really changed, and a lot of this has to do with a lot of additional products, not just Swagelok, but a lot of companies have taken on over the last 20 years. A lot of these newer products have focused a lot of these companies to then become experts in that new product that they picked up.
One example I can think of really has to do “tank blanketing” of storage facilities. You see the tanks on the side of the road, the big white tanks, and those contain gasoline products. And on the top of those tanks, they will blanket those with nitrogen to make sure that they’re optimally operating that tank farm. A customer reached out to one of our sales and service centers, they were having an issue with nitrogen blanketing of those storage tanks. We found out there were a lot of issues with it. It wasn't custom tailored to the tank that they were trying to blanket – they just kind of threw a bunch of pipes together and some components.
They were getting poor nitrogen flow to the vapor space of the tanks, and through countless hours of investigation and spinning their own wheels, they enlisted the help of Swagelok’s field engineering team, who came in and performed a root cause analysis. And luckily, our global group of field engineers who respond to the call, they have extensive training on this topic, and they were able to identify the primary issues which the end customer couldn't pick up on, and resulted in this situation in the system they were experiencing. Initially I thought this was a product issue, but the customer actually enlisted the help of that team to help lay out the optimal system that they were trying to install, and they injected these recommendations into the next turnaround.
So when you talk about the way things used to be, where vendors weren't involved, now you're talking about vendors actually being involved in the planning of that project. How many hours is it going to take? What are the materials they need? How many people do they need onsite start to finish, oil-in / oil-out and everything in between? The benefits of this type of customer relationship that we keep seeing more and more is knowing that you have specialists that can see solutions where others cannot. So talk about the benefits of engaging with your suppliers early and often. These are some expertise areas where they can actually really get to the root cause of that issue, and then really put together a well-tailored system for you that matches more closely with what you may have come up with in the past.
PS: Sure, that makes a lot of sense. Let's move from root cause over to general turnaround support services, which Swagelok also provides. The other case study that caught my attention in the presentation was a petrochemical company which took advantage of some of those services to address some of their control valve issues recently.
MA: We see this all the time, and this example is a little bit different than the first one, because that was a piping system, right? Swagelok is not known as a piping company; we're a tubing company, and so we usually stay on the smaller side of things. With control valves, usually the instrument air being fed to the diaphragm and the actuator is already made of tubing, so it makes perfect sense for a customer to historically call up Swagelok to figure out what's going on. In the defense of a lot of facilities out there, they have miles and miles of instrument air tubing connections, and so determining what actually is going on in their system is a little bit more difficult to figure out.
In this case the customer just couldn't figure out why their instrument air pressure was so low. They assumed that it had something to do with line losses, either with leaks or the tubing layout itself. The local Swagelok sales and service center enlisted the help once again of their field engineering team, and they wanted to perform a leak detection audit on the tubing and hoses going all the way back to the instrument air header. So you have these instrument air systems that are being fed by compressors or a compressor, and there's a lot of connections in there, so determining exactly why they're getting line losses is a pretty big undertaking.
One of the great things about this is our field engineers have gone through all this training and you can do this with the training they received, and they have a variety of tools and certifications to do so. They were not only able to identify and quantify the leaks, but also to provide recommendations for system improvements, which eventually made their way into that turnaround project folder or into the scope.
I think it's safe to say that Swagelok services allowed the customer to get their problems fixed and improved, and justify the improvements with documented cost savings. It makes it easier for people running projects to basically say, “we need Swagelok, or we need this particular vendor to come out and help us with this system because they have the expertise, and here are the documented cost savings that allow that to be included in the scope.”
PS: As we close out the podcast, let me ask you, what are some of the final takeaways that you think plant teams should consider as they move into their 2024 summer and winter turnaround seasons?
MA: I say this with a little bit of a smile, but forget everything pre-2020. I don't think those days are coming back and I would say that more planning (especially around the detailed work) can be accomplished. I would say don't be scared that you look at this and say, “this is a gigantic undertaking.”
I would definitely suggest enlisting the help of your suppliers. A lot of times they're viewed as salespeople, but a lot of times they have resources on their end that can assist with things that you may not know about, so reach out to them, it can be one of the most important aspects of turnaround and project work.
For the ones that I've been involved with in the past, the more people you have involved in this stuff to give you really good recommendations, the better. Since these people are experts of the products you're installing, they really can fulfill those details that you need to make your project run smoothly, and you can have each of your project teams reach out to them directly.
Some of the areas that they may be able to help with is material takeoffs. Have them come in and maybe do a unit or a facility walk down of their system, this can result in things like reduction of excess components that you don't need, or even saving you the trouble of putting the wrong component in. Maybe they can discover something that you didn't.
They can also give you areas for upgrades. One of the things floating out there right now is ESG, it's placing a lot of pressures on end users to do things such as low emission valves or looking at total energy usage, maybe even some more detailed drawings. We talked about the quality control, the people on site. Well, how much better would it be if they had a full drawing of exactly what they were installing, instead of just a rough P&ID or some other basic drawing.
Spares and local inventory is also a huge thing. A lot of times they take these units apart and discover things that were not part of the original scope, like a cracked heat exchanger tube or something they couldn't pick up during their normal rounds. Maybe the list of materials they need is not complete, right? So, lean on your suppliers to keep excess stock for you when you need it. They can also support emergencies. We've heard of suppliers actually being on site in shifts to support that turnaround work. Understanding root cause analysis so as things turn up, you can actually investigate those components and find out what went wrong, and maybe that's the time to make that change.
And then finally, training. I mentioned IOGP earlier, that seems to be one of those areas where it can be surprising for contractors to find out a week or two before they're beginning work, so that can be one of those emergency things that you can reach out to your supplier on, to fix those issues before they happen.
About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.
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About the Author
Thomas Wilk
editor in chief
Thomas Wilk joined Plant Services as editor in chief in 2014. Previously, Wilk was content strategist / mobile media manager at Panduit. Prior to Panduit, Tom was lead editor for Battelle Memorial Institute's Environmental Restoration team, and taught business and technical writing at Ohio State University for eight years. Tom holds a BA from the University of Illinois and an MA from Ohio State University