Advanced Maintenance Shutdown and Turnaround Planning Training Course

Course overview

Major maintenance shutdowns and turnarounds concentrate months of work, contractor activity, production risk and capital expenditure into a short execution window. Poorly defined scope, weak work packs, unrealistic schedules, unavailable materials or late isolation planning can extend outage duration by days and create safety, quality and restart risks. This course equips experienced maintenance and project professionals to plan shutdowns as controlled, integrated programmes rather than collections of individual work orders.

Participants learn to build a shutdown basis of estimate, define scope through worklist governance, develop logic-driven integrated schedules, establish critical paths and manage schedule risk. The course addresses work breakdown structures, job-plan maturity, resource loading, contractor interfaces, materials readiness, turnaround cost control, risk registers, SIMOPS coordination, isolation planning and commissioning readiness. Participants practise using Primavera P6 and Microsoft Project concepts alongside maintenance data drawn from SAP S/4HANA Asset Management.

Teaching combines instructor-led technical sessions with a realistic process-plant turnaround case. Teams review an incomplete worklist, challenge scope, create a milestone hierarchy, develop a resource-loaded schedule, assess constraints and prepare control documents for execution. Each participant leaves with a practical Shutdown and Turnaround Planning Pack containing a scope-freeze workflow, integrated schedule structure, readiness dashboard, risk register, materials-expediting tracker and post-turnaround lessons-learned template.

The course is designed for maintenance, reliability, operations, project and turnaround personnel who already understand plant maintenance fundamentals and now need to lead or assure complex outage planning. It is equally relevant to managers seeking stronger governance over shutdown duration, cost exposure, contractor performance and safe return to service.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Develop a shutdown work breakdown structure linked to asset systems, work orders and execution areas
• Apply scope challenge and scope-freeze methods to control late emerging work
• Build a logic-driven integrated turnaround schedule with milestones, dependencies and critical-path analysis
• Calculate resource requirements and identify crew-loading, access and shift-pattern conflicts
• Produce a materials readiness tracker using long-lead, repairable and warehouse-status data
• Construct a turnaround risk register with quantified schedule, cost, safety and startup risks
• Create execution control dashboards for progress measurement, constraint removal and management escalation
• Prepare a commissioning and handover readiness plan with system turnover criteria and close-out actions

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Turnaround Managers — who must integrate scope, schedule, contractors and restart readiness across the outage
• Maintenance Managers — who approve work scope and must protect asset reliability within a fixed shutdown window
• Maintenance Planners and Schedulers — who convert work orders and job plans into executable, logic-linked plans
• Reliability Engineers — who prioritise statutory, integrity and reliability work for inclusion in the shutdown scope
• Project Engineers and Project Managers — who coordinate capital projects and tie-ins with maintenance outage activities
• Operations Supervisors — who manage isolations, operating windows, SIMOPS constraints and safe plant return to service

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have practical experience in maintenance planning, shutdown execution, project controls or plant operations, ideally with involvement in at least one planned outage. The course assumes familiarity with preventive and corrective maintenance work orders, basic job plans, Gantt charts, critical-path terminology, resource estimates and permit-to-work principles. Experience using SAP PM or SAP S/4HANA Asset Management, Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project is helpful but not mandatory; exercises explain the required functions and templates. Advanced mathematical modelling, programming, formal project-management certification and detailed knowledge of a specific industry’s regulations are not required.

Training methodology

The five-day programme uses short instructor-led modules followed by planning workshops built around a realistic refinery-style turnaround case. Participants interrogate a worklist, construct schedule logic, load resources, test constraints and make decisions at simulated readiness reviews. The instructor demonstrates relevant planning functions in Primavera P6, Microsoft Project and SAP S/4HANA Asset Management using prepared data extracts. Group teams present scope, risk and execution-control recommendations to a mock turnaround steering committee. The final session converts the case outputs into an individual application plan for a forthcoming or recent outage.

Course outline

Day 1: Turnaround strategy, scope and governance

• Turnaround lifecycle gates from strategic decision to post-outage review
• Shutdown objectives, success criteria and basis-of-estimate development
• Asset-system breakdown structures and turnaround worklist architecture
• Scope challenge using risk, statutory compliance and production-loss criteria
• Scope-freeze governance and late-work approval thresholds
• Roles, decision rights and turnaround steering-committee governance
• Work-pack maturity requirements for mechanical, inspection and project work

Workshop: Participants review a flawed outage worklist and produce a prioritised scope challenge log with accept, defer and investigate recommendations.

Day 2: Integrated scheduling and resource planning

• Milestone hierarchy for shutdown, maintenance, testing and startup phases
• Precedence diagramming and logic-link development in Primavera P6
• Critical-path, near-critical-path and negative-float analysis
• Schedule quality checks for open ends, excessive lags and invalid constraints
• Resource loading by trade, shift, workfront and contractor package
• Crew curves, productivity assumptions and peak-labour conflict resolution
• Microsoft Project views for communicating simplified execution schedules

Workshop: Teams build a logic-linked turnaround schedule, identify the critical path and issue a resource-conflict resolution plan.

Day 3: Readiness, procurement and contractor interfaces

• Readiness assurance matrices for work packs, access, permits and isolations
• Materials status control for long-lead items, repairables and staged kits
• SAP S/4HANA Asset Management work-order and reservation data for planning
• Contractor scope packaging, bid assumptions and mobilisation milestones
• Constraint registers and look-ahead planning for workfront release
• Scaffolding, lifting, temporary facilities and site-logistics planning
• SIMOPS coordination between operations, maintenance and capital-project activities

Workshop: Participants create a 90-day readiness dashboard and materials-expediting tracker for a constrained turnaround work package.

Day 4: Risk, cost and execution control

• Turnaround risk identification using schedule, technical and operational risk categories
• Qualitative risk scoring and risk-owner assignment
• Schedule risk analysis concepts, contingency logic and recovery triggers
• Time-phased cost forecasting, commitments and change-control discipline
• Daily progress measurement using earned quantities and installed work
• Control-room reporting, escalation thresholds and management action logs
• Recovery planning for emerging defects, contractor underperformance and lost workfronts

Workshop: Teams run a simulated day-six execution review and produce a recovery recommendation covering risk, cost, schedule and escalation actions.

Day 5: Startup, close-out and organisational learning

• Mechanical completion, system turnover and commissioning boundary definitions
• Isolation removal, leak testing and reinstatement readiness controls
• Startup critical-path management and operations acceptance criteria
• Defect management, punch-list categorisation and temporary-repair governance
• Shutdown close-out metrics for duration, cost, quality and safety performance
• Lessons-learned facilitation and action ownership for future outages
• ISO 14224 failure-data coding for reliability feedback and scope optimisation

Workshop: Participants assemble and present a complete Shutdown and Turnaround Planning Pack, then create a 60-day workplace application plan.

Tools & standards covered

Oracle Primavera P6, Microsoft Project, SAP S/4HANA Asset Management, ISO 14224

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions