Turnaround and Shutdown Management Software: Custom Build or Buy Prometheus

What the off the shelf products actually do well

Day nine of a twenty eight day turnaround. A vessel comes open, the inspector finds wall loss beyond what the last inspection predicted, and the manager needs to know what it does to steam out. Eleven hundred contractors are on site burning money by the hour. That is the pressure that makes people ask whether they should build something, and the honest first move is to credit the tools that already exist.

Oracle Primavera P6 is the scheduling engine for this work and nothing you commission should try to replace it. It holds activities, logic, resources and float in a form your scheduler already thinks in, and it survives being handed to a contractor's planner. Hexagon EcoSys and Cleopatra Enterprise are serious cost control and estimating platforms, and where your cost breakdown structure is clean they forecast well. Prometheus Group STO is purpose built for shutdowns and binds tightly to SAP work orders, which is a real advantage on an SAP site. IBM Maximo and SAP Plant Maintenance hold the notifications and work orders your scope comes from.

Between them those products cover scheduling, costing and the maintenance record. That is most of the software a turnaround needs and it is all supported by vendors who will answer the phone during your event.

So say the plain thing first. Most sites reading this should buy. Short repeatable outages run by people who know the plant do not need a custom system, and building one is overhead that competes with the maintenance budget that would actually reduce your scope.

Where they stop: discovery work has no fast path

Here is the specific workflow no product models well, and it is the one that decides whether you restart on the date the commercial team sold.

A discovery job travels a fixed route: the inspector writes it up, an engineer reviews it, an estimator prices it, the manager approves it, a planner schedules it, materials are chased and a contractor is mobilised. Each handover is an email or a corridor conversation, and the elapsed time is a day or two while the equipment sits open and a crew stands at a gate. Nothing in P6 or a cost tool shortens that, because the delay is not in the schedule, it is in the handovers between people who each hold part of the decision.

The second thing they model badly is scope challenge. Between the worklist freeze and the day the plant comes down, the list grows, and every added item is defensible in isolation. Sites run challenge sessions with a spreadsheet on a projector, and the outcome of the meeting does not stick to the item. Three weeks later the same job is back under a different notification number and nobody remembers it was rejected. A durable scope object with a state machine, a named acceptor, a deferral target event and duplicate detection on equipment tag turns the post event question about why the job grew by thirty percent into a report rather than an argument.

The third is readiness. A crew cannot start until the permit is available, the isolation is hung and verified, the scaffold is tagged, the material is staged at the right laydown, the tooling is booked, the blind list is signed and, for code work, the procedure and a qualified welder are both present. Most sites track that in a spreadsheet per discipline that is accurate the moment it is saved and wrong an hour later. Standing time is the single largest controllable loss in an event and no product computes readiness as a state.

The arithmetic: named users at peak against a build

Cost control and shutdown platforms price per named user per month, which is awkward here because a turnaround is precisely the moment you need a lot of named users at once and almost none between events.

Run it. Out of season you need perhaps twelve seats: planners, the cost engineer, the turnaround manager. During execution you need superintendents, coordinators, contractor supervisors and materials controllers, which at a mid sized event is a hundred and forty. At $180 per named user per month, twelve seats year round is about $26,000 and a three month execution ramp adds roughly $75,600, so one event cycle costs you a hundred thousand before any implementation. Two events a year and the number is not a line item any more.

The crossover sits between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and eighty named users at peak, which in practice means events above roughly forty thousand contractor hours. It moves down fast if you run several sites, because the value of a common scope register and shared productivity history compounds, and it moves down again if your contractors need access, since vendors price external users least generously.

What a custom build actually costs

From Digital Heroes delivery experience, a first release covering the scope register with challenge workflow, work pack readiness as a computed state, daily field progress capture with rules of credit, and a live forecast runs $80,000 to $170,000 over 14 to 20 weeks. Time it so go live is at least one full event cycle before the turnaround, because you want a small shutdown to shake it out. A full platform adding cost integration, contractor productivity and labour and equipment reconciliation, materials and tooling readiness, permit and isolation linkage, scenario comparison and post event benchmarking runs $220,000 to $550,000 over 8 to 14 months.

Two lines are missing from every quote. Data migration runs 10 to 25 percent of the build. Here it means the equipment tag master reconciled against the maintenance system, historical scope registers from the last two events, your estimating norms, and the actual productivity records that make the next estimate better than a memory. Tag reconciliation is the unpleasant part because a site that has been operating for decades has tags that exist in three systems with two spellings.

Year two runs 15 to 20 percent of build cost annually. Schedule interface maintenance, new contract structures with their own rates and shift premiums, changes to the maintenance system, and the ordinary work of keeping offline mobile capture alive.

The four situations where building wins

Regulatory and safety fit. A turnaround at a covered process sits inside the Process Safety Management standard at 29 CFR 1910.119, so any change to a covered process runs through Management of Change and nothing restarts without a Pre Startup Safety Review. Inspection scope arrives from API 510 for pressure vessels, API 570 for piping and API 653 for tanks, on intervals you do not control. Code repairs require a qualified procedure and a welder qualified under ASME Section IX, with radiography hold points that sit in the schedule as real constraints. Linking those records to the work pack rather than a filing cabinet is what makes a restart defensible.

Scale economics. Past roughly a hundred and fifty peak users, and certainly across two events a year, the seat cost exceeds what owning the system costs and it still is not shortening your discovery path.

A workflow that is your competitive advantage. Scope challenge discipline and rules of credit agreed before the event are the two practices that separate sites that finish on plan from sites that do not. They are operating models, not features, and no vendor ships them in the shape you run them.

Integration sprawl across three or more systems. SAP Plant Maintenance or Maximo, Primavera P6, a cost tool, contractor timesheets, and an inspection data manager. When the turnaround manager is personally the integration layer between five of those at four in the morning, that role is the software you have not bought yet.

How to decide in a week

Run this test rather than watching more demonstrations. Take your last event. Pull ten discovery jobs and measure the elapsed hours from the moment the inspector wrote it up to first tool time on the repair. Then take the final scope list, count how many items were not on the freeze list, and count how many of those additions have a named acceptor you can identify today.

If discovery moved in under eight hours and every addition has a name against it, your process is disciplined and P6 plus a coordinator is the right answer. If discovery averaged two days and half the additions have no traceable acceptor, multiply two days of standing time by your hourly contractor burn and you have a business case in your own numbers rather than anyone's brochure.

Then buy a paid discovery phase rather than a build. Digital Heroes writes a signed product requirements document before any code exists, covering the object model for scope item, work order, schedule activity, work pack and readiness prerequisite, the schedule interface contract and the acceptance criteria. You own that specification and can take it to any firm on your shortlist. We contract through India LLP, US LLC and UK LTD entities so intellectual property assigns under your own law, and we have delivered more than 2,000 projects with a named team you meet before signing.

We are the wrong firm if you want the schedule automatically resequenced or safety systems commanded. We will not build either. Scheduling logic is where judgement lives, and an automated resequence during an event is how you lose the trust of every superintendent on site.

Book a 30-minute call with Digital Heroes and get a written plan and a fixed quote within 48 hours.