How to Rapidly Recover Plant Operations After a Crisis
Downtime is simply not an option when you run a refinery or petrochemical plant. How can you strengthen resilience in your facility management program? Start with these three tips:
1. Cover Your Assets
When a crisis strikes, there’s no time to second guess your equipment, systems, or infrastructure.
To speed recovery, put effort upfront to secure your real estate portfolio. Consider doing asset condition assessment on a two-year cycle – every year for critical assets, every other for non-critical areas. As an asset is renewed, add in a criticality and risk assessment to get a full picture of system health.
Documenting the state of your facilities can speed decision-making. It’s a small investment that will pay off when an emergency strikes.
2. Know who’s got your back
Who do you call when you need facility management support during a storm?
It’s essential to have a network that will prioritize your operations. Consider building a secondary supply chain in a neighboring region. This could be with vendors, similar types of operations or even an emergency warehouse. When problems arise, your operation will be able to recover faster.
During Hurricane Ida, Sodexo mobilized teams from Texas to support operations for oil and gas clients in New Orleans. While most of the region waited for local responders, our Texas teams caravanned bringing the resources, supplies and equipment needed to get refineries and offshore platforms back online in a matter of hours.
Even the worst winter storm couldn’t stop our ongoing service and support. During the 2021 ice storm in Houston, our staff stayed at the refinery in 24-hour shifts to do maintenance and repairs.
3. Invest in agility
Energy pricing is far from the peaks of the mid-2010s. Plant managers face daily pressure to cut costs and prove return. Where is capital best spent?
We advise our downstream facility management clients to think long-term when responding to budget cuts.
The safest investment is to fund systems, processes and tools that will make your plant adaptable to change. Whether you spend on automation or prepare for a shift from oil refinery to biofuel plant, staying ahead of trends will enable your operations to weather any storm.
Why invest in resilience? Because the only thing you can count on is change.
We believe that energy and mining companies deserve better service and support than the usual industry standard. So, we’re raising the bar.
It means we empower our frontline teams to be your day-to-day partners - anticipating and responding to your needs, solving your challenges and improving our support for you every day.
Good enough is no longer enough.
That’s why we’re committed to service excellence, zero accidents, and a better tomorrow for you, your people, and the communities we serve.