Reconsidering the Potential of Commissioning and Startup

 

Imagine if a globally acclaimed sports apparel firm failed to check or assess its products prior to putting them into the market for the world’s best athletes. Consumers would likely to be taken aback and they may even feel deceived to find that the quality and reliability of the products they purchased were not verified before placing them into the market.

This would almost definitely cause the brand to lose consumers’ trust and confidence in their products. However, the reality is that these companies do invest a great deal of money and time to verify and test their products. This is done as the companies are pretty much aware of the worth of their investments and the damage they may incur due to their products’ poor performance or unhappy customers.  

Sadly, for many sectors, it is quite likely to underrate the importance and value of carrying out the verification process – particularly for larger projects, like a newly constructed facility or plant. The startup and commissioning processes offer companies a chance to determine that all components and systems of the facility are installed, designed, operated, maintained and tested as per their operations-specific requirements.

Incorporating these practices into a project helps prevent expensive assumptions and facilitate continued, top-quality service across a wide range of sectors.

Understanding the Value of Commissioning

For a project team, moving any facility from the concept phase through the completion or fully operational phase is surely an exciting move. To optimise efficiency, right from the onset, the managers must be able to run the facility to its optimum potential from the very first day. However, attaining a completely functioning building or process startup is no mean feat and needs an investment of resources, both financial and otherwise.

Facility owners usually concentrate on keeping the operational cost low, for all the right reasons. However, in the absence of a proper commissioning process, facility owners may be forced to spend more on operators time, energy, cost of products sold or replacement of equipment, than they would invest on commissioning. This is one fact that is often overlooked by many key stakeholders.

There are many benefits a company can realise by hiring a commissioning management organization or having proper commissioning in place. These may include assessing equipment and components if they are running efficiently, streamlining the construction schedule with task delegation and coordination, and preventing overuse of any equipment by fine-tuning set points to avoid possible future problems by verifying all operation modes. These advantages offer real value in the investment.

A financial cash flow analysis will depict a 10% exceed on capital, which could end up costing nearly half of what a 1% loss in efficiency will cost in a period of one decade. In simple words, with ineffective equipment and building startups, companies possibly risk a huge sum of money.

To avoid such a situation, companies should keep the end results in mind and plan early on for the shift from construction staff to maintenance staff. Irrespective of the sector or the kind of facility, making use of a commissioning or startup process can lower current operational costs, reduce an organization’s time to start production and cut down the number of component or equipment failures.  

Such a process will leave a positive impact on project schedules by roping in the construction team early on in the project. If startup and commissioning are planned in advance, many problems can be averted during the design or construction phase, instead of identifying them during the functional testing phase.

To avoid schedule slippage, it is vital that the team identifies all startup and commissioning tasks along the crucial path. Doing so will allow general contractors as well as subcontractors to achieve critical schedule milestones while providing a more believable date for completing the project.

Salient Features of Successful Startup

The value, as well as the outcome of creating rigorous and exhaustive startup and commissioning processes, spans both the equipment and human variables of any given project. Here are six important aspects to consider:

• Defining Success Goals and Criteria: The first and foremost thing to do is to establish clear goals. How will the project move to the maintenance team from the construction team? What are the parameters of the organization for accepting a building?

• Assessing Startup Risks: This includes carrying out a rigorous startup risk assessment and establishing key areas of focus. What are the utilities required for the startup of the process equipment? Do the original equipment producers require the utilities in advance to begin construction and pre-startup activities? Are all activities considered in the schedule?

• Developing Startup Strategy: This involves creating an in-depth startup strategy to match the project objectives. The strategy should include design engineers as well as operation and maintenance staff, along with startup and construction team to prevent any unnecessary changes later on in the process.

• Developing Early Learning Plan: Find subject matter experts who can help with the implementation of an ongoing commissioning process. Involve them early on in the project to develop expertise and ownership. Determine who will own the equipment post-startup or turnover.

• Creating Training Plan: Develop a training plan to transfer key information from subject matter experts to equipment operators. Involving the operators in commissioning and startup is an effective way to make them learn how the systems and equipment work. Get them involved early on during the startup planning phase will also allow them to take ownership of the equipment at turnover. This will decrease time to move from mechanically complete to turnover.

• Integrating Problem-Solving: Create and execute an effective problem-solving or troubleshooting plan during startup. By concentrating on assessing the equipment early on during the startup phase, you can expedite integration testing towards the end of the task and lower punch list items. 

The startup and commissioning processes offer companies a way to have a facility that is designed, installed and verified to function optimally. Carrying out these steps towards the end of any project offers real value – realized with the faster delivery of an effective, dependable facility. Doing so ensures organizations that they will see a favourable return on investment, specific to their project and can continue to offer the highest quality of service that their clients expect.

Commissioning, qualification and validation processes can be complicated, hence finding and partnering with an experienced commissioning management organization can bring more value to sophisticated construction projects.