Shutdown Activities

Make it more simple. Think! The base principles:

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I use Milestone for ShutDown activity. I make sequence of activites to reach that Milestone. From ShutDown what do you do next? Put the other set of activities.

You can group your Plant/Equipment units. Do not put 100’s of them in the program. Remember that Plant/Eq. are more static subjects it is not dynamic.

Are you asking about scheduling these tasks as a daily maintenance item (ie. while the plant is operating), or as a turnaround project (ie. where the plant shuts down for a while)?

Bernard Ertl
ATC Professional Shutdown / Turnaround Management System

The work is to be done during scheduled plant outages.

As you will know plant maintenance requires scheduled outages and any planner worth his salt will try to complete all project shutdown work within these maintenance shutdowns to minimise the impact on production.

I have a feeling that P3 is not cut out for this kind of complex scheduling.

Hi,

I have done quite a few shutdowns\outages and have never needed more than about six to eight calenders, which P3 is more than capable of handling, I think you misunderstand the use of calendars. For example, you will need possibly a calendar for five days a week normal hours, a six or seven day week day shift\night shift\twenty four hour calendars. Besides this you might need extra calendars for NDE (x-rays) or perhaps heat treatment, or any other specialised work.

For any individual resources, you can set availabities. Further you can use constraints (finish not later than) for areas or equipment that require specific finish dates.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Your post tends to indicate that you are attempting to define the starting and ending parameters for the shutdown with a calendar rather than scheduling the work on a working basis and letting the critical path fall where it may.

If you are creating a turnaround project file encompassing only the work for a specific downtime period, I don’t see where you will have a huge number of calendars (regardless of what scheduling tool you use).

Bernard Ertl
ATC Professional Shutdown / Turnaround Management System

No, it is not for work to be completed within a specified window but more a tool to manage the available windows (float)

Hi Brennan,

If it is float you are trying to manage, try using buffer activities, at the end of each logical path, that will force each of the path to go critical ie zero float, and give the buffer activities a specific code, this will enable you to check what is happening in each path after every update, and is a simple way of managing float.

Regards

Philip