In this section of the site contributing authors submit interesting articles relating
to the various services, industries and research & development efforts of Becht.
How to Identify a Hidden Productivity Constraint in Your Process Outage Plans and Schedules During inspections and maintenance outages, labor cost is usually a significant expense. In order to meet the required cost and duration goals, worker efficiency is critical. As part of the job plans and schedule creation, a planning team was able to […]
FROM THE TOP, is a new mainstay in Inspectioneering Journal. This column will explore how different parts of organizations can partner in a collaborative manner to discover new efficiencies, improved equipment integrity, and opportunities to capture additional margin. Introduction This past year has been a challenging one for our industry. The ongoing pandemic, coupled […]
Overview from article written for the May 2021 edition of “The Chemical Engineer” magazine… Maintenance turnaround teams are under ever increasing pressure to improve their cost estimating prowess. A gap in the steps towards improvement is the reluctance of maintenance turnaround teams to take the time to document their cost estimates. By writing a basis […]
Just as people schedule an annual wellness visit to the doctor, it makes good sense to do the same for your cooling system and its components. This is particularly important because of the deleterious effects of Covid on cooling systems. Over the last year, manufacturing facilities have suffered because of reduced on-site service, inability to […]
Avoid This Surprise When Determining How Long Your Next Process Outage Will Take Continuous processing or manufacturing facilities will occasionally require planned outages to primarily address reliability or maintenance issues. Due to the high cost of these outages (opportunity and real), careful planning and scheduling practices are used to come up with detailed execution plans […]
In Part 1 we observed that some of the best results come from organizations with poor maintenance work processes and some organizations with a great work process have poor results. It was also noted that the maintenance work process itself only accounts for 10% to 20% of the total maintenance value. In Part 2 we […]
In the April 2021 edition of “The Chemical Engineer” magazine, I highlight the importance of using clear and prescriptive scope selection criteria for your maintenance turnaround, in order to facilitate scope optimization during the scope challenge. Below is a brief overview of the article. It is generally accepted in the maintenance turnaround community that the […]
Part 1 of this article, which appeared in the April issue of Hydrocarbon Processing, discussed the inception of piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs), their development and maturity, and the challenges in between. The causes, scheduling and limitations of changes to P&IDs, and the Management of Change (MoC) process will be discussed here. CAUSES OF LATE […]
The Recommended Practices issued by AACE International are widely recognized and have been adopted in estimating and control departments across the process industries. Until recently, the focus of these practices was mainly on capital projects. However, they are now also beginning to cover Maintenance Turnarounds. As an initial step in covering this important aspect of […]
In our industry, most companies are continuously managing risk, efficiency, and production interruptions that may have resulted in millions of dollars lost. To mitigate these unplanned events and improve productivity, improvement projects executed, employee training is conducted and equipment strategies are implemented. Reliable equipment that is 100% available and ready when needed is a very […]
