Turnaround Management - Book Report/Review Example

A turnaround is not seen as an event by itself, but as a link in a continuous chain that incorporates lessons learnt from previous turnarounds. A core team - consisting of individuals from departments that are directly linked to turnarounds - and a steering committee - consisting of persons from the senior management - form the backbone of the exercise, constantly interacting with each other, before, during and after the turnaround, over matters of budget, time and workscope. Thus, it is constantly overseen from both event and business perspectives.

The article highlights Organisation, Planning, Costs and Execution. Moreover, it bestows enormous importance on audits and reports and their benefits. Audits, reviews and reports can be used as instruments to garner commitment from the various teams involved, and help in analysing the progress of the turnaround at every stage. (Oliver, 2001). This is an electronic poster that advertises a Conference on Turnarounds where speakers from 14 renowned companies from the Asia-Pacific region share their experiences through case studies and workshops.

The scope of learning is immense; topics include interaction between Operations, Maintenance and other departments; optimizing planning and scheduling without compromising quality of work; advance forecasting of production requirements; training for contractors; how to justify that expenditure of more time and money reduces downtime and costs; delegating the right people to the right positions for efficiency; risk management; ensuring safety and injury-free overhaul by using hazard analysis; and benefits of audits, reviews and reports on turnarounds (Conference, 2005).

Surviving the Maintenance ShutdownThis article deals mostly with the planning and execution phases of the turnaround and illustrates the use of Project Software in accomplishing the task. Traditionally, Gantt charts or bar charts were used to indicate workscope on a timeline, but they were unable to exhibit relationships between jobs. This was replaced by the Critical Path Method (CPM) which considers the shortest path required to accomplish a task. Based on Logic Network - which is constructed using precedent logic - the CPM sorts critical jobs chronologically,