Engineering Visual Presentation E06: Exploring the engineering value of shutdown history: survey findings and a digital framework for shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages (STO) knowledge retention

Engineering Visual Presentation E06 Shutdowns, turnarounds, and outages (STOs) are among the most complex, high-risk, and capital-intensive activities undertaken by upstream energy operators. Although STOs are executed repeatedly across asset lifecycles, many organisations fail to systematically retain and reuse knowledge gained during previous events. This results in recurring execution issues, expanding scope, schedule overruns, and high variability in outcomes. This paper explores the challenge of STO knowledge retention through a small exploratory survey and supporting industry context. A structured survey of professionals across Oil and Gas, Mining, and Utilities organisations (n = 13) was conducted to explore current practices for documenting, accessing, and reusing STO knowledge. The results indicated that STO knowledge is often captured in unstructured formats, is difficult to access during planning, and is rarely reused in a systematic way. Respondents associated this gap with repeated issues, planning inaccuracy, and schedule overruns, although the small sample size means these findings should be interpreted as indicative only. The paper then introduces a cloud-based approach to institutionalising STO knowledge, using STO360 as one example of how structured execution data may be captured and retained across shutdowns. Industry adoption context from a large-scale upstream operator is presented to illustrate how structured digital knowledge retention could support improved review efficiency and cycle time reduction. The paper concludes by outlining how a standardised STO data foundation may enable future application of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to improve predictability and performance. To access the Visual Presentation click on 'Supplementary data' below. To read the full paper click here