Although 80 days were scheduled for this mammoth project, the facility in China was safely restarted after just 71 days of maintenance. The project was not only completed ahead of schedule, it was also on budget. And even more importantly, there wasn’t a single reportable incident or a first aid case recorded at the Bayer Integrated Site Shanghai (BISS).
“I would like to thank everyone from the PUR Business Unit, the BISS and BTS teams who contributed to this outstanding achievement that enabled us to significantly improve our plant utilization and efficiency,” says Christian Eh, who heads the P&T unit of the PUR Business Unit in Caojing. The careful advance work and the focused execution of over 500 work packages document the excellent teamwork at the site.
The project for expanding MDI production capacities in China from 350,000 to 500,000 metric tons per year “consumed” over 1.2 million work hours during the execution phase. “At peak times more than 2,200 employees were daily deployed in order to complete the XXL turnaround on time and on budget,” he adds. The intensive preparation phase began in January. The official starting gun sounded in early April, and the work was completed two months later.
„Lessons learned“
The local team had recently completed another but smaller turnaround: After three years of operation, it was time for the first prescribed maintenance of the world-scale TDI plant at BISS. This was completed smoothly and without any accidents, and the plant was successfully restarted after 41 days of maintenance (see BMS.ON report). At peak times more than 500 colleagues were involved, and 500.000 work hours were needed to execute the project. The experience gleaned here flowed into the current turnaround.