Shutdowns, Turnarounds and Outages (STO)

Ready to get started?

Talk to an expert and discover what Hexagon can do for your organisation.

Overview

Challenges for Shutdowns, Turnarounds and Outages (STO)

The urgency to address management challenges within Shutdowns, Turnarounds and Outages (STOs) has reached a critical juncture. Industries are not only grappling with budget overruns, misalignment with strategic business goals, and a lack of historical data for effective asset management but are also facing a dire shortage of experienced resources. This scarcity of skilled personnel intensifies the need for efficient STO solutions, as organizations can no longer rely solely on manpower to overcome these hurdles.

However, waiting until STO events begin to solve these issues risks significant financial losses, operational bottlenecks, and even safety compromises. To combat STO challenges, industry leaders are leveraging Hexagon’s Enterprise Project Performance (EPP) solution, EcoSys™ to more effectively manage STO initiatives.

The EcoSys platform delivers a transformative approach to STO Portfolio Management, combining centralized data, long-range planning, and strategic budgeting to enable smarter decision-making from the enterprise level down to individual site events. EcoSys allows organizations to plan, visualize, and financially forecast STO events years in advance—across all facilities—balancing workloads, optimizing cash flow, and improving resource utilization. By aligning shutdowns with broader corporate goals, EcoSys turns historically siloed STO processes into a cohesive, proactive strategy. The result? More control, less chaos – and turnarounds that run smoother, safer and more successfully.

Ready for less stressful turnarounds?

Key benefits of STO Portfolio Management

EcoSys processes are tailored to meet the needs of STO portfolio management, providing better:

Visibility

Gain an enterprise-wide view of all STO events—including costs, schedules and resource requirements—to prevent overlap, identify synergies and balance workloads across facilities. EcoSys enables advanced scheduling and financial forecasting up to 10 years or more in advance, empowering data-driven decision-making at every level.

Efficiency

Streamline annual budgeting processes by leveraging centralized data, automated workflows and historical turnaround (TAR) performance. EcoSys simplifies planning across departments—engineering, procurement, operations and finance—creating a single source of truth that eliminates redundancy and reduces manual effort.

Strategic Alignment

Support early-stage estimation and long-range planning with conceptual estimating capabilities. EcoSys uses historical data at the asset level and escalation factors to create more accurate forecasts, ensuring that individual STO events align with broader corporate financial goals and strategic priorities.

Risk Mitigation

Identify potential risks early using integrated analytics and data from previous STOs. With visibility into cost variances and schedule deviations, EcoSys helps reduce unplanned downtime, budget overruns and safety incidents.

Contractor Management

Evaluate and select contractors based on performance and suitability using a centralized contractor matrix. This ensures the right teams are engaged at the right cost, improving accountability and execution quality. Then integrate with systems to consume contractor actuals quickly to accelerate reporting and forecasting.

Control Estimate Integrity

Lock in control estimates post-purchase order issuance to establish a reliable financial baseline. EcoSys enables accurate tracking of actuals against this baseline, improving cost control and post-event analysis.

Continuous Improvement

Capture lessons learned and performance insights from completed STOs to optimize future events. EcoSys supports a phased approach that builds continuous improvement into the STO lifecycle—from planning through execution and beyond.

Enable collaboration

Enable collaboration for greater alignment

In today's industrial landscape, effective STO management critically depends on robust asset management practices coupled with accurate planning.

However, many organizations are grappling with the complexities of 'different colors of money,’ where expenses are categorized differently across departments and projects. This disparity, coupled with the absence of historical data, often managed through fragmented homegrown spreadsheets and access databases, leaves STO event planning terribly inefficient. It creates financial strain and hampers the alignment of expenditures with overarching business goals.

EcoSys addresses these challenges head-on with its STO Portfolio Management solution by providing a centralized platform to harness and leverage your data. This facilitates seamless TAR (Turnaround) planning and execution, enabling you to gain comprehensive insights, streamline expenditures and enhance operational efficiency in STO management.

Additional highlights

Additional STO Portfolio Management Highlights

Leverage EcoSys to minimise the risk and downtime associated with STO across your enterprise:

Create and manage financial, human (including contractor data) and equipment resource plans for STO events.
Optimise resources based on demand, progress and performance.
Develop detailed estimates and resource plans to optimise STO scope.
Integrate with ERP systems and time and cost management systems to automatically extract and load cost, schedule and progress data.
Accurately calculate forecasts based on progress and performance and adjust remaining work plans accordingly.
Identify and manage issues, risks and changes with consistent STO management procedures with EcoSys Visual Workflows.
View dashboards and respond to requests on any mobile device.
Automatically calculate KPIs to report performance quickly to stakeholders.

Ready to maximise efficiency and minimise downtime?

Connect key process areas for powerful project solutions

Shutdowns, Turnaround and Outage management is just one of the essential processes in EcoSys that serve as building blocks for exceptional project and portfolio management.