Becht Engineering can provide resources with an owner’s perspective to help ensure your projects and turnarounds are successful in terms of safety, quality, cost and schedule. We have seasoned professionals to successfully manage, plan, review and supervise plant projects and turnarounds.
~ A Comprehensive Contracting Plan is an Important Building Block to a Successful Plant Outage ~ During planned maintenance outages, many facilities must contract out a significant portion of their work. Contractor selection is an important step that involves securing the qualified contractor personnel, given the critical role they play in successful outages. Furthermore, a […]
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 […]
Major Maintenance – work commonly called “Pitstops” or “Squats” – can be forgotten in the hectic world of Turnarounds and Routine Maintenance, so how do you judge the readiness and whether you are doing the right work? Pitstops or Squats are normally smaller events in size and duration that fall between doing everyday routine maintenance […]
I LOVE Turnarounds! The excitement – The planning – The organizationOne major focus with a million minor tasks that consume you for at least 12 hours a day (or night) As in the movie “Apocalypse Now” with Robert Duval as Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, delivers the classic line “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” […]
In our experience as Turnaround Readiness reviewers and participating in lessons learned events, owners who pay close attention to contractor readiness end up with better turnaround performance. While this seems an obvious observation, the details which emerge from lessons learned from post-turnaround reviews reveal the complexity and criticality of the Owner/Contractor relationship. Preliminary review of […]
Critical Path Analysis, Schedule Optimization or Cold Eyes Review (call it what you want) are all designed to check your Turnaround (TA) Schedule for logic, manpower and equipment efficiencies that can affect the duration of the TA Schedule. When margins are high you can have unit-down-days that are worth upward of $1MM/day. For this type margin […]
Where will crane mats be in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years? It takes approximately 90 years to grow a 12-inch by 12-inch oak timber twenty feet long. High quality hardwood timbers are becoming harder to find. This is widely known but rarely discussed. The shortage of wood timbers is a national problem. Timber Mats […]
Using the right software tool can save time and improve results of Risk Based Work Selection (RBWS) which is a standalone work process aimed at optimizing turnaround (TA) work scopes. RBWS uses risk assessments to determine if individual worklist items are justified by Health, Safety, & Environmental Risks or Financial Risks. Significant reductions in turnaround […]
The API Inspection Codes were originally based on failure prevention and did not consider the consequences of failure or potential damage mechanisms. Risk-based inspection (RBI) assessments result in an equipment risk ranking based on the probability of failure (a leak occurring) and the consequence associated with that leak. Applied properly, RBI provides the benefit of […]
Over one hundred thousand floating roofs have been used in hydrocarbon (oil) storage tanks since the 1950s. A majority of these tanks continue to be in service and are critical to meet strategic storage needs. An earlier article in this blog category describes Industry Best Practices for inspection and maintenance of such tanks. View Maintenance […]
