Outages and Shutdowns at Central Arizona Project: A Planning Approach for Success

IMC-2018 Learning Zone 46:57

by Marcus Corley and Scott Lane, Central Arizona Project

Outages and shutdowns are a big part of many organizations in terms of labor cost, lost revenue and risk to equipment just to name a few. Completing an outage and returning to service when scheduled is paramount. The degree of planning involved to successfully execute an outage depends on factors such as equipment type, access, complexity, size, location and age as well as personnel skills and availability. In addition to these factors, seasonal outages at Central Arizona Project involve remote facilities and infrastructure distributed over 336 miles. Given this geographic complication, outage plans are typically developed with minimal coordination between facilities supervisors and crew's resulting in inefficient work execution and increased backlog. To improve outage planning and schedule compliance, CAP developed a standard outage planning process by refining current practices and implementing new control. To advance the process further we integrated our CMMS system and project scheduling software, and developed unique fields and associated processes to tag and group work orders. We will present CAP's outage planning & scheduling process and demonstrate the benefits of our integrated CMMS/scheduling software. Finally we will summarize our outage KPI's using our current process compared to previous performance.