The Power of Scheduling Tools: Why Turnarounds Can’t Afford to Fly Blind

Introduction

In turnaround management, time is the most valuable commodity. Every day offline costs millions in lost production, and every delay ripples across staffing, contractors, and budgets. Despite this, I recently led a post-turnaround assessment at a site without a scheduling tool in place.

There was no Primavera. No integrated plan. No sequencing or critical path. Execution was essentially limited to “working from lists” and hoping things would line up in the field.

That experience reinforced a hard truth: without formal planning and scheduling, you aren’t running the turnaround; the turnaround is running you.

The Problem: Executing Without a Schedule

On this site, the absence of scheduling discipline showed up in several ways:

• No critical path: Leadership couldn’t tell which tasks controlled the overall duration or where delays would hurt the most.

• No sequencing or dependencies: Crews were assigned tasks without a clear view of what had to happen first, or how one delay cascaded into others.

• No craft quantity tracking: There was no reliable method to forecast manpower demand by craft. Staffing became guesswork.

In short: the team was flying blind, resulting in lost time and lost revenue due to avoidable delays and extended downtime.

The Impact: Cost, Control, and Contractor Reliance

Working from lists instead of a schedule doesn’t just create inefficiency; it shifts control away from the owner and into the hands of contractors.

1. Staffing Blindness
   Without a resource-loaded schedule, you can’t forecast how many welders, pipefitters, or inspectors you’ll need week by week. That leaves the owner dependent on the contractor’s headcount forecasts. And when you can’t challenge those numbers with your own data, you can’t separate what’s necessary from what’s padded. Accurate cost estimates are also impossible without this visibility, making resource allocation and budgeting unreliable.

2. Incentivized Inflation
   If hours and staffing levels are unchecked, contractors have every incentive to inflate manhours. The owner ends up paying more for the same amount of work, and disputes over “what’s fair” become inevitable. A schedule provides a fact base to push back. The turnaround and project controls manager plays a critical role in reviewing these plans, coordinating teams, and ensuring schedule adherence.

3. Uncontrolled Costs
   Without sequencing or dependencies, delays pile up unnoticed until they become critical. At that point, the only way forward is often to throw more people at the problem or delay the startup; both of which drive costs even higher. The latter compounds the issue by adding lost production costs on top of turnaround overruns. Equipment rentals, when planned in advance, can be a cost-effective resource to help control expenses during these periods. These issues impact not just individual turnarounds but also other projects across the facility.

4. Reactive Leadership
   Without schedule data, leadership meetings devolve into anecdotes and opinions. Managers debate whose fault the delay was, instead of focusing on how to get back on track. Execution shifts from proactive control to reactive firefighting.

In this case, all of these factors were present. The lack of a schedule meant the owner had little leverage in staffing discussions, no ability to anticipate bottlenecks, and no structured way to measure readiness. These challenges are not limited to turnarounds but also affect larger maintenance events and capital projects.

What Would Have Helped

Following best practice in turnaround planning and execution is essential to ensure process efficiency and quality. The solution isn’t complicated: every turnaround needs a formal scheduling tool and process that supports turnaround planning.

• Adopt Primavera P6 (or equivalent) as the backbone. Use it to establish an integrated, logic-driven schedule with critical path, resource/craft loading, and scenario analysis. This shifts the team from “working a list” to managing a plan. The planning phase is a crucial part of this process, setting the foundation for successful execution and minimizing downtime.

• Embed Scheduling Into a Broader System. Primavera isn’t a standalone fix. For a schedule to work, it has to be tied into:

  • A Control Document that defines milestones and ownership.

  • Centralized Scope Collection so every job is approved and ranked before it enters the plan, with clear selection criteria that are mutually agreed upon by facility or corporate leadership.

  • Standardized Work Packages that flow cleanly into the schedule without late clarifications.

Each of these deserves its own discussion, but the point is simple: a schedule only works when it is the hub of an integrated planning system. A structured planning process is vital for plant turnaround and shutdown event activities, as it coordinates all key focuses during planning and execution phases. Learning from past turnarounds and leveraging team expertise further strengthens the approach and drives continuous improvement.

The Big Picture: Discipline and Accountability

Scheduling is not “just software.” It’s a process that requires discipline:

• Owner discipline. With Primavera and a published baseline, the owner can test contractor headcount proposals, challenge delay narratives, and hold teams to measurable targets.

• Contractor discipline. When work is tied to a transparent plan, everyone knows performance is being measured. That reduces gamesmanship and reorients focus on results.

• Team accountability. A single version of the truth aligns supervisors, planners, inspectors, and executives. The discussion shifts from opinions to data-backed decisions.

Without that discipline, accountability evaporates. Costs drift, staffing swells, and the owner ends up paying for uncertainty.

Takeaway

Turnarounds are too big, too fast, and too expensive to run without a formal schedule.

The principle is simple:

If you don’t control the schedule, the schedule controls you.

Primavera (or equivalent) must be the foundation. Without it, you’re flying blind.