How To Prepare for Turnaround Season

Turnaround season is a rite of passage, a biannual process allowing critical scheduled equipment maintenance. It’s also a necessary time to plan and assess what equipment is needed, needs an upgrade, or needs replacement.

Here are essential tips to encourage preparation for a remarkable turnaround season.

Plan Ahead for a Successful Turnaround Season

A crucial element of a successful turnaround season is to plan well ahead. Pre-planning ensures that a plan details the work needed, the challenges and the goals for the turnaround period.

Strategic planning for your turnaround can take on multiple time horizons – two, five or even ten years into the future. That planning allows you to forecast what will be needed each year to complete a successful turnaround. It details potential risks and provides a long-term outlook for each turnaround season.

Pre-planning for a specific turnaround season should incorporate indexing all your equipment and contractors. It determines what testing and cleaning equipment are necessary and the personnel needs to ensure timely completion.

A critical element of your planning should be what hydrostatic testing needs doing. Hydrostatic testing helps you evaluate your components' reliability, safety and stability. Turnaround season is a critical time to use a hydrostatic test pump in a controlled environment to ensure the identification of any potential failure points.

Drive Efficiency for an Effective Turnaround Season

Your planning for turnaround season is critical. So is the need for an efficient turnaround process. Strong logistics are essential to finding success in a turnaround season.

Those processes start with having the right team and personnel resources ready to execute. In addition, clear communication solutions are necessary. From in-field technology to data transfer to cloud data storage, they’ll ensure your people can communicate with each other and share information.

Operational logistics are another critical component. Transportation controls, ensuring that equipment and teams deploy in a timely and precise manner, are an essential consideration.

Contingency planning is vital. You need the flexibility to change on the fly as emergencies, delays, or unforeseen issues arise. Speed is critical when developing a turnaround season. Having strong logistics and operations in place means you can get the most out of downtime.

Do you have the right processes for testing your torque tools, including using hand torque wrench test units? Torque wrenches using too much or less force can mean faulty nuts and bolts. If that hardware malfunctions during production, it can damage machinery and be a safety issue. Testing torque includes the first movement, loosening, and marking tests.

Save Customers Money

The key outcome of any turnaround season is ensuring that the equipment used is operational, free of flaws and ready to operate as intended. Doing so will save your employers and customers time and money.

Analytics and simulation technology allows you to focus your work and understand the implications of anticipated or emergent scenarios during turnaround work.

Another way to ensure that turnaround season is cost-efficient is thorough with your calibration tests. Tools need to be inspected and calibrated or accredited every year.

The turnaround period is an expensive yet necessary endeavor. It’s essential to plan carefully to reduce the costs to all involved by using the right tools and executing with precision and accuracy.

Since 1987, Aztec Bolting has provided hydraulic tooling products and services that help control bolt tightening in various industrial bolting applications. We serve the petrochemical, refining, oil and gas, wind generation, power generation, pipeline construction and maintenance, custom fabrication and specialty construction industries.

To learn more about our products and services, contact us Aztec Bolting today.