Methanex Corporation

A turnaround is often judged by how quickly a plant returns to service. That matters, but it is not the whole story. The more important question is what the business gains afterward: safer operations, stronger reliability, improved efficiency and greater confidence in future production. The objective is not simply to deliver a worklist. It is to strengthen asset performance while deploying capital, people and planned downtime where they create the greatest value.

Start with the operating outcome

Project execution timelines are most often aligned with turnarounds to leverage the planned downtime while at the same time typically presenting the greatest risk to cost and schedule to turnaround events. For the best outcomes, alignment begins well before a project enters the execution pipeline.

As capital scrutiny continues to increase, establishing key criteria for project selection is critical. That means connecting investment decisions to asset vulnerabilities, operational constraints and business priorities - not treating each proposal as an isolated engineering solution.

For each opportunity, the essential questions are straightforward: What risk are we reducing? What operating outcome are we improving? Why is this the right time to act? Safety, regulatory and integrity requirements establish the foundation. Reliability, energy efficiency, production capability and lifecycle value help differentiate the remaining opportunities. A technically attractive project must also be sufficiently developed, resourced and integrated with the site's business and turnaround plans to deliver its intended benefit.

Across a global manufacturing network, this requires balancing local needs with portfolio priorities. While I’ve seen varied approaches, a center-of-excellence approach brings common standards, technical expertise and shared learning to site-led delivery. Multiyear capital planning and long-term turnaround planning provide the framework for coordinating investment, outage windows and specialist resources. Success should ultimately be tested against the operating improvement delivered, not expenditure alone.

Reduce downtime through preparation, not compression

The strongest opportunity to minimize turnaround downtime comes well before shutdown. Clear objectives and risk-based scope selection establish what must be achieved to support the next operating cycle. Early scope challenge helps distinguish essential outage work from activities that can and should be completed outside the shutdown window. The aim is not indiscriminate scope reduction; it is the right scope, with a clear justification for every inclusion or deferral. All too often we see scopes of work that slip into a turnaround that could be completed in-run with the thought that it’s more cost effective when in most cases the opposite is actually the case.

“The objective is not simply to deliver a worklist. It is to strengthen asset performance while deploying capital, people and planned downtime where they create the greatest value.”

Project and maintenance planning must then converge into an integrated execution plan. Engineering maturity, materials availability, contractor mobilization, inspection requirements and operational readiness all influence whether work can proceed as scheduled. Protecting the critical path requires more than identifying its longest activities: it requires removing the constraints that could prevent those activities from starting or finishing. Late scope changes need explicit assessment of their safety, resource, cost and schedule implications.

During execution, a consistent management rhythm helps teams identify emerging constraints, coordinate interfaces and act on reliable progress information. Productivity improves when crews have executable work, clear instructions and ready access to materials and support—not simply when more people are mobilized. Equally, mechanical completion is not the finish line. Quality assurance, operational handover and startup readiness must remain integral to the plan. Saving time during maintenance has little value if rework or an unstable restart consumes it afterward.

The trends that will shape performance

Two developments stand out. First is the move toward connected, decision-ready data. Digital work processes, integrated asset information and timely field reporting can improve visibility of readiness and execution constraints. Predictive analytics and artificial intelligence offer further potential to identify vulnerabilities and support planning. Their value, however, depends on trustworthy data, practical workflows and engineering validation. Technology should strengthen accountable decisions, not replace technical judgment.

Second, execution capability and supplier integration are becoming both more important and more vulnerable. Across the industry, experienced, skilled craftspeople are leaving the workforce just as large-scale developments such as data centers are creating extraordinary demand for labor, intensifying resource constraints in some sectors. In the near term, these pressures will reshape both turnaround and project execution strategies.

Advice for aspiring leaders

Leading manufacturing projects and operational excellence requires both technical credibility and business judgment. For professionals aspiring to these roles, a few habits make a lasting difference:

• Learn the business behind the asset. Understand how reliability, production and margin connect, and explain projects in terms of operating outcomes and value.

• Spend time in the field. Turnarounds are won or lost at the work face. Credibility comes from understanding the constraints that operators, crews and contractors face.

• Challenge scope with discipline. Ask why work belongs in the outage window, and be prepared to defend a deferral as firmly as an inclusion. The additional cost of executing scope during a turnaround event, or the “turnaround tax,” is very real.

• Build relationships before you need them. Operations, maintenance, engineering, procurement and contractors must work as one team. Trust established early pays off when plans change.

• Treat every event as a learning opportunity. Capture lessons candidly and make sure they shape the next plan rather than sitting in a report.

The workforce challenges facing our industry also create opportunity. Professionals who combine technical depth with strategic thinking, and who invest in developing others, will be well positioned to lead the next generation of turnaround and project performance.