Turnaround preparation.

Today's turnaround preparation workflow

A typical turnaround preparation cycle runs through:

• T-36 to T-24 months — long-lead equipment identification and strategic scope definition.
• T-18 months — scope freeze for major work items; engineering begins on each scoped item.
• T-12 months — P&ID review and MTO development in earnest.
• T-9 months — work packages developed; contractor bidding begins.
• T-6 months — final MTO; material procurement.
• T-3 months — final staging, resource mobilization.
• T-0 — execution window.

The P&ID-dependent work concentrates between T-18 and T-6 months. This is where engineering teams work through each scoped work item, extract the affected piping and components from the governing P&IDs, and build the MTO that drives procurement and staging.

The specific challenges

• P&ID scope definition. Every work item in the turnaround scope affects some subset of the facility's P&IDs. Identifying which drawings are affected — and which specific regions on those drawings — is itself a manual task.
• Component-level MTO extraction. For each affected region, the piping, valves, instruments, and fittings must be extracted into the turnaround material list. At 8–24 hours per drawing for manual extraction, a turnaround covering 500 P&IDs consumes thousands of engineering hours in MTO development alone.
• Cross-drawing connectivity. Turnaround scope frequently spans multiple drawings. Lines that continue from one drawing to another must be tracked across the scope boundary. Manual reads routinely miss these connections, producing MTO gaps that surface during execution.
• As-built drift. Brownfield facilities carry accumulated as-built drift from the last turnaround cycle. MTO based on stale drawings produces stale procurement specifications.

How Armeta transforms turnaround preparation

Armeta's extraction engine produces structured, cross-drawing-connected component inventories for any P&ID scope. For turnaround preparation, the typical engagement:

1. 01Scope drawing identification — the P&IDs affected by the turnaround scope are identified and ingested.
2. 02Structured extraction — each drawing is processed to produce the structured component inventory for the affected regions.
3. 03Cross-drawing reconciliation — off-page connectors are traced across the scope boundary, eliminating the cross-drawing connectivity gap.
4. 04Revision validation — each drawing is compared against the last documented revision to identify as-built drift that should be walked down before MTO is finalized.
5. 05MTO delivery — structured MTO output in the facility's standard format, ready to feed procurement and staging systems.

The engineering outcome

For a typical major refinery turnaround with 500 P&IDs in scope:

• Manual MTO preparation: 6–12 months of engineering work, thousands of hours.
• Armeta-supported MTO preparation: 8–12 weeks.
• Engineering hours reclaimed: 5,000–8,000 per turnaround.
• MTO accuracy improvement: typically 5–15 percent reduction in overpurchase.
• Schedule risk reduction: material, particularly on the T-6 to T-0 window.

The compounding value across turnaround cycles

Turnarounds are recurring events on 4–6 year cycles. A facility that structures its P&ID archive during one turnaround preparation carries that structured baseline forward to the next turnaround, the next MOC cycle, the next HAZOP revalidation, the next LDAR program update. The initial investment in structured P&ID data compounds across every downstream workflow for the facility's operating life.