What is an STO (Shutdown, Turnaround, and Outage)?

STO: Definition, Features, Benefits, and Resources

When it comes to shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages (STOs), it is crucial that everyone is on the same page about what they mean.

In some industries, the connotation of a shutdown or outage may be related to a safety concern. For others, it may be a commonly used term for a routine maintenance project that cannot be executed on a running plant or unit.

Understanding what STOs are and being on the same page enables maintenance departments to quickly perform emergency maintenance.

In this article, we will cover what shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages are and how you can manage them more effectively and efficiently.
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The Definition of a Shutdown, Turnaround, and Outage (STO)

A shutdown, turnaround, or outage (STO) is a maintenance event that may be planned or unplanned. A shutdown, turnaround, or outage will usually require an asset, unit or a whole plant to suspend operations until the maintenance activity is complete and any safety and start-up checks are signed off.

For most industries, the longer the duration of the STO, the more money that is lost (since they could have been producing products if the system was online). This makes it crucial for STOs to be managed effectively from start to finish. This typically requires a sustained period focusing on preparation, planning and scheduling to ensure that we are in a confident position entering the execution phase.

Each term within the STO can mean something different depending on which industry you are talking about. However, shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages each have a general definition that most people will recognize.
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What is a Shutdown in Maintenance?

A shutdown is when maintenance takes one or multiple assets out of commission to perform maintenance. This can affect a portion of production but does not usually prevent all production from continuing like in turnarounds and outages.

A shutdown is generally planned and has a time frame of around a few days, sometimes up to 2-3 weeks. Shutdowns that only take out a portion of a plant’s assets allow a minimum level of production to be sustained while maintenance is carried out.

Some industries will use the term “shutdown” interchangeably with the term “outage.”
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What Is a Turnaround in Maintenance?

A turnaround is a planned maintenance event that requires a plant, or an entire portion of a plant to go completely offline for maintenance. Production is not able to resume until the turnaround is completed and checked for potential errors.

When these types of events occur, it is paramount that they are well planned and stick to the schedule. If a turnaround takes longer than expected, it can cost the facility hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue due to delayed production.

Turnarounds are planned 18-24 months) in advance and generally last around 3-12 weeks.
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What Is an Outage in Maintenance?

An outage is generally unplanned and involves a partial or complete stoppage of your plant. Since it is unplanned, this type of maintenance event can pose more of a risk to the production and safety of your site.

When outages occur, maintenance should have the tools necessary to identify the issues and fix it as quickly as possible to get the facility up and running again.

Outages can take weeks, months, or even years, depending on the severity of the problem, the industry, the organization, and scale of the outage.
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How You Can Manage STO’s Efficiently and Effectively

Whether you are dealing with a planned or unplanned STO, you will want to have a handle on your resources, inventory, and regular maintenance schedule.

If you do not, sudden STOs or even planned STOs can throw a wrench in your maintenance routine. They can also take longer than necessary if you do not keep the correct spare parts stocked and ready.

For some industries, if their STO takes even a day longer than anticipated, it can lead to hundreds of thousands or even millions in lost production.

STO management software is a great way to stay ahead of your shutdown, turnaround, or outage. By keeping things organized, you can be prepared for planned or unplanned STOs and minimize the time it takes.

It is important for your STO management software to integrate with your ERP, EAM, or CMMS system to ensure that data is not lost and every detail of your STO is communicated effectively.
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Gain Control of Your Shutdowns, Turnarounds, and Outages With Our STO Suite

As a maintenance manager, knowing the difference between shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages and what they entail is important. Once you have that down, then you need to make sure you manage your STO efficiently.

Fortunately, there is a tool that integrates with your ERP, EAM, or CMMS system to make your planned and unplanned outages run smoothly and stay on track – our STO Suite.

Challenges of Shutdowns, Turnarounds, and Outages

Shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages have many moving pieces and condensed timelines, which provide many challenges with:

Time constraints
Coordination complexity
Resource allocation
Cost overruns
Safety risks
Data management
Regulatory compliance

Fortunately, centralized STO management systems can help bring all details into one spot to provide increased visibility and control over STO planning, budgeting, isolations, and execution to increase the success and accuracy of STOs.

Key Features of Prometheus Shutdown, Turnaround, and Outage Software

STO Planner

STO Planner provides a web-based command center to unify and integrate your various systems to optimize your facility or plant shutdown, turnaround, or outage management strategy, from planning to execution and beyond. Leveraging STO Planner streamlines communication, reporting, and documentation.

Scope Management: A robust scope management system allow teams to manage and maintain control over the STO scope throughout the duration of an event; this includes a configurable set of permissions that help minimize scope creep, increase visibility of scope documents and schematics, provide more transparency.
Materials Management: Request, approve, and track materials for your STO. Integrates with your ERP system to provide real-time status.
Staging and Kitting Materials: Stage and kit materials post goods-receipt. Indicate material delivery and assign materials to project-specific storage locations. View kit and material status in STO Execution schedule.
Detailed Work Package Planning: Leverage a rich library of existing work packages and standards to fast-track planning. Push planning changes to SAP and P6 on demand.
Planning Progress Tracking: Transform your turnaround planning from “gut feeling” to data driven. Know that your plant is ready for your upcoming STO.
Role-Based Access: Employees and contractors with role-based access to the appropriate data to avoid unnecessary access to owner-operator’s or other contractor’s data.

STO Execution

STO Execution is a state-of-the-art solution that integrates and extends your existing systems to create a single, unified command-and-control center for managing the execution of a turnaround, shutdown, or outage. For outside contractors working on an STO event, STO Execution serves an extension to an organization's record of truth and allows for them to enter data without ever having to access your ERP, EAM, or CMMS.

Integrated STO Management System: Integrates all work order, schedule, clearance, and RP data into a single unified view accessible to all members of your STO team during the execution phase of a shutdown, turnaround, or an outage.
Real-Time Access to STO Schedule: Places information in the hands of decision-makers by providing a live interactive schedule that reflects job completions, progress, delays, and problems from the field.
Simplified Progress Collection: Easily create and collect progress updates from the field throughout the lifecycle of an STO event from any device; teams can continuously review schedules and prioritize jobs that require updates based on specific criteria.
Job Alerts: Enables users to flag specific jobs they need updates for and are automatically notified of any changes made to the status of a job or task from the field.
QA/QC Packages: Minimize production system downtime by building and tracking QA/QC package completion. Build and track QA/QC package completions by generating a sweeping checklist and ensure that teams followed the configured processes.
Inspection Planning & Execution: Prepare for inspection jobs and be ready to handle “discovered” work.
Punchlist Management: Hold Contractors accountable to performing their work to specification. Track punch list closeout through STO completion.
Mobile Progress Collection: Collect progress updates directly from the field, perform instant analysis, and notify supervisors, schedulers, and OCC management as needed.
Multi-System Data Integration: Integrates with all major systems involved in a shutdown, turnaround, or outage, including Ventyx Asset Suite, SAP, Maximo, Primavera, Ventyx eSOMS.

STO Isolations

Safely shutting down and de-energizing units is essential to a successful STO event. A turnaround’s success hinges on Operation’s ability to correctly identify the proper sequence and procedure of shutting down equipment. STO Isolation allows for Operations and Turnaround teams to collaborate on isolation plans, mark up P&IDs (Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams), and track isolation progress as the plant safely shuts down and starts up in an incident-free event.

Identify Isolation Conflicts: Centralize isolation planning to prevent conflicting isolations from resulting in lost time or injuries.
Combine Work and Safety Planning: Associate isolation and discipline plans to effectively combine isolation plans for similar work, reducing the number of blinds and isolation devices needed.
Template and Reuse Isolation Plans: Build a historical list of isolation plans to eliminate the need to rebuild isolation plans from scratch.
Build Isolation Lists: Digitally prepare isolation lists with blind points, and isolation activities. Identify the isolation devices needed, and their dimensions to understand blinding demands.
P&ID Markup: Mark-up P&IDs to indicate isolation steps. Color coded cards indicate isolation types and progress to give users a real-time isolation state on the P&IDs.

STO Budgeting

Gain more control and visibility into your shutdown, turnaround, and outage’s budget the STO Budgeting add-on. Create long term plans, rough orders of magnitude (ROM), and definitive estimates easily within the STO budgeting module. Gain historical data on past turnarounds and perform comparisons on material, labor, and rental costs.

Control Over Budget Versions: Reduce spreadsheets and PDF reports by leveraging budgeting snapshots in STO Budgeting.
Snapshot Comparisons: Compare trend estimates and identify changes between base and current estimates.
Consistency: Leverage standard breakdown structure templates to ensure standardization in budgeting process from project to project.
Generate Long Term Plans: Project a multi-year outlook for executive teams based on historical information.
Intelligently Calculate ROM During Scoping: Utilize a parameter-based model to calculate the rough order of magnitude for each discipline involved in a scoping item.
Produce Definitive Estimate: Form definitive estimates of costs, contractors, labor, and materials required for your turnaround.

Benefits of STO Software

Control Over Scoping Process:

Build templates and workflows to ensure that scope is collected with the proper justification and estimates. Freeze scope and implement addendum process to highlight changes to scope post-freeze.

Improve Visibility to Materials Post-Goods Receipt:

Most ERP systems do not track non-stock materials after a goods receipt. As turnarounds heavily leverage non-stock materials, STO Planner gives confidence that materials are staged and available, with visibility of material availability on 36-hour schedule lookaheads.

Increase Planning Accuracy:

Utilize templates, standard activities, and norms-based estimates to simplify work package planning.

Reduce Material Spend:

Limit spend on free text materials by leveraging SAP Material Masters through Material Shopping Cart.

Integrate with All Other System:

The Prometheus Platform is a web-based, comprehensive solution, one that can easily integrate with all other systems used by a team to manage a shutdown, turnaround, or outage.

Improve User Adoption:

Increase user adoption rates with a simplified, user-friendly tool that can keep your STO maintenance, operations, and safety teams on the same page, through each phase of the STO.

Reliable and Fast:

Locate and review approvals and status updates quickly and efficiently.

Configurable Interface:

Configure and manage user access through an easy-to-use centralized system, ideal for teams working with short-term contractors.

Comprehensive STO Execution Management System:

Streamline business processes and deliver actionable information to all departments, teams, and workers at all phases of an event, ensuring that a plant or facility can get back online on time and under-budget.

Capital Projects:

STO Execution’s advanced communication, progress collection, schedule analysis, and resource coordination features can provide an easy-to-use, standardized approach to extending project schedules to the parties involved in your project. It improves the execution performance of any shutdown or turnaround capital project.

Real-Time Updates:

Review and track real-time progress updates collected in the field.

Controlled Access to Primavera:

Minimize the number of contractors who can access Primavera (P6) with configurable permissions and conditions, preventing unauthorized data changes.

Prometheus STO Software Resources

If you are interested in finding out more about how you can manage your STOs successfully with the Prometheus STO Suite, reach out to us today.

Prometheus Group November 3, 2022

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