Issue link: https://info.corpedgroup.com/i/777435
WHY ARE MAINTENANCE OUTAGES NECESSARY? Maintenance outages are driven by a number of factors, including but not limited to: • code or regulatory compliance work; • scheduled preventive or corrective maintenance scope; • capital improvement changes or additions; • desired operational improvements; and • other scopes of work. Whether nuclear or fossil fueled, the planned outage could impact just generating equipment or entire process plants and facilities if it's a plant outage or the wider electrical substation and grid in a system outage. The objective of any planned outage is generally to restore or improve the operability, maintainability, efficiency and safety of the plant and its processes. Without this work, the plant may have to reduce capacities, be at risk of increasing forced corrective maintenance outages, or perhaps, shuttered altogether. A successful, efficient and streamlined outage management process and plan can have a beneficial impact on the profitability of your operations overall. Extending a planned outage (or an unexpected forced outage) by even a day can cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars against your company's bottom-line financial performance. THE BIGGEST CONTRIBUTING FACTOR TO INEFFICIENT OUTAGE MANAGEMENT: POOR PLANNING Poor portfolio and project planning leads to unnecessary scope or other scope excesses, schedule delays, budget overruns, delays or elimination of other beneficial capital and Operations & Maintenance (O&M) work, and quality issues that compromise operating results post outage. Attention to planning and execution must be paid both before and during the outage itself. The challenge is to maintain the planned progress throughout the outage and to minimize problems that arise as the planned time reaches its end. What many energy producers don't realize is that complying with the outage schedule early on, is most critical; more so than towards the end of the planned outage cycle. By understanding the source of risks, their likelihood and impact, and the integrated dynamic of risk in the schedule and budget, you can effectively mitigate most of the negative impacts of an outage. Four Outage Management Best Practices to Keep Costs Down and Customers Happy 2