Project Management Methodologies to Reduce Shutdown Duration

Rick Phelps; Wendell Simpson
Tags: maintenance and reliability, continuous improvement, lean manufacturing, planning and scheduling, manufacturing

Project Management Methodologies to Reduce Shutdown Duration

Plant shutdowns can cause major business disruptions when they don't go as planned or finish on schedule. Reducing the duration of a shutdown while improving its quality can significantly impact an organization's top and bottom lines. 
 
In this article, we will discover how Cleveland-Cliffs (Cliffs), a steel producer and mine operator, was able to improve their annual major equipment shutdowns from averaging 17 days (plus or minus four days) to just four days (plus or minus two hours) over a couple dozen shutdowns. The company achieved similar results across all major equipment rebuilds, plant shutdowns, and process changeovers at all their sites, producing over $100 million annually in sustained annual savings.

Shutdown Project Management Methodologies

The cliché "no plan ever survives the first contact with the enemy” seems alive and well in the maintenance world. One common “enemy” encountered in maintenance shutdowns is mistakes in the scope of required repairs. Instead of focusing on various ways to improve the diagnosis of needed repairs, we will focus on a common “enemy” widely unrecognized in the maintenance industry – flawed project plans stemming from flawed project management methodology. 
 
Not all plans are created equally; they are a product of the company's project management methodology. The methods used to develop project plans or shutdown schedules were all over the map at Cliffs. But they all had one commonality – they were useless at predicting when specific tasks would occur and when the equipment would be handed over to operations. The plans never survived first contact with reality. 
 

Critical Path Method

Many project plans are developed using the Critical Path Method (CPM). 
 
According to the Harvard Business Review, CPM can be used for analyzing, planning, and scheduling large projects by determining which jobs or activities are critical based on their effect on total project time. Then, the jobs are scheduled in the best order to ensure the project is completed on time and at the lowest cost. 
 
However, shutdown plans built using CPM have difficulty surviving their first encounter with the "enemy"—task variability. 
 
In the 1990s, Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt developed a better method for planning projects that enabled shutdown improvement quickly. This improved project management method is called Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM). CCPM addresses two significant problems with CPM. 
 
The first problem is how CPM handles task dependencies. CPM only considers the technical dependencies between tasks—where one task cannot start until another task has been completed. CPM does not recognize the other type of dependency prevalent in plant shutdowns – tasks can be independent from a technical perspective and still depend on a shared resource such as a skilled individual, piece of equipment, or physical proximity. Shared limited resources were prevalent at Cliffs, so our plans needed to reflect these dependencies to avoid overloading them. 
 
The second problem with CPM is that it cannot handle the task variability inherent in shutdowns. Planners must estimate how long tasks will take, with most allotting extra time to account for task variability and avoid shutdown extensions later.  
 
The padded task times resulting from this perfectly rational mindset set the project up for failure, as the task times tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. If the planner overestimates the task for three hours, then the work crew is guaranteed to take three hours—at least! 
 
Tasks in a CPM schedule either finish on time or late and rarely finish early. This sabotages the shutdown's ability to finish early, causes havoc with resource scheduling, and generally destroys the integrity of any resulting schedule based on such estimates.
 
The net result of these two flaws in CPM is that the critical path (the set of tasks determining project duration) changes during the project's execution. The changing critical path results in reprioritizing tasks, leading to chaos and firefighting. This chaos destroys a plan and the ability to learn from it.
 

Critical Chain Project Management

The CCPM method requires the planner to develop two estimates for each task: an aggressive 50% estimate and a conservative 90% estimate. 
 
The aggressive estimate answers the following question: “If everything goes to plan, how long should the project take so there is a 50% chance of completing the project on time?” The 50% estimate is aggressive but not impossible. For the conservative estimate, you would ask, “If things go wrong, how long would the task take if you wanted to be 90% confident of finishing in that amount of time?" 
 
The difference between the 50% and 90% completion timelines is the planner’s estimate of task variability. When incorporated into the schedule, it provides two possible shutdown durations—how fast it could be completed and how long it could take if things went wrong, such as having the wrong part, missing tool, or misaligned bolt pattern.
 
Critical Chain Project Management builds the plan using the aggressive 50% estimates; the difference between this and the conservative 90% estimates is calculated to create a "project buffer." This buffer is allotted at the end of the plan's projected schedule to account for mishaps, creating a more robust schedule that is unlikely to change during execution. 
 
The project buffer shows the range of possible completion times. The project is unlikely to be finished before the beginning of the buffer but is highly likely to be completed by the end of it. However, the real benefit of the buffer comes once the project has started. 
 
The planner updates the schedule at regular intervals and recalculates the projected times of the project activities. If the project falls behind, tasks are pushed into the buffer, using up some of the project's protection. Buffer usage is plotted on the Fever Chart and reported at regular intervals. 
 

Figure 1: Tracking Project Progress Using the Fever Chart
 
Each time the Fever Chart is updated, the planner and the entire work crew know how much buffer time has been used, what caused the buffer consumption, and what they can do to regain it. 
 
Additional benefits of CCPM for shutdowns include:
 
  1. It will shorten a shutdown project plan immediately, or if resource dependencies are significant, result in a more realistic and obtainable plan.
  2. It will make a shutdown plan far more robust, eliminating most of the chaos during execution resulting from the critical path moving and priorities changing.
  3. Monitoring the consumption of the project buffer during execution will enable a facility to predict the shutdown's completion time with confidence as it progresses.
  4. It will allow planners to identify the critical few tasks that determine the duration of a shutdown.

The Impact of CCPM 

At Cliffs, my team and I decided to attempt using CCPM for the first time when we discovered it had been years since the facility had completed a shutdown plan in under 17 days. With our plan, we projected completion in just 12 days. 
 
Although we encountered a couple of big mistakes on the Critical Chain, the plan was successfully executed in only nine days; had we not made the mistakes, the outage would have been completed in just seven days. 
 
The initial success described above set the stage for a revolution in how we approached maintenance and continuous improvement at Cliffs. Within a few short years, this methodology was inspiring work teams across all Cliffs locations—people love to be successful, and here, finally, was a way to get everyone involved and feel part of a success story.
 
Critical Chain Project Management simplified Cliffs' world and enabled them to focus on the few critical things that make a huge difference. In the case of that first shutdown, it took over 300 work tasks to identify the 17 essential tasks that would determine the duration of the shutdown. 
 
They took just five of those 17 and concentrated on improving them, and they had a huge impact – a fantastic success! Had they "improved" any of the 283+ other possible tasks, their work would have been unnoticed, underappreciated, and had little positive financial impact on the business.

Conclusion

Winning atmospheres are created when limited resources are utilized to manage and improve the few critical tasks with the largest positive impact on business. 
 
At Cliffs, the maintenance team saw their efforts paying off as shutdowns became more efficient, work tasks were prioritized, and the workplace became more organized around the things that produced positive results. The headaches disappeared, as did much of the frustration and cumbersome rework. Do this, and your team will become more successful, feel more successful, and be more engaged and motivated at work. 
 
 
This article is based off a featured speaking presentation hosted by Rick Phelps and Wendell Simpson at the Reliable Plant Conference. To learn more about attending Conference, click here.