marcus evans Discusses Managing Outage Capital and O&M Budgets in Real Time

NEW ORLEANS, May 17, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Running outages cost-effectively and efficiently without sacrificing operational excellence, proves to be repeatedly unpredictable and challenging for power plants.

Joe Kimlinger, Director, Outage Management at Dynegy, recently shared with marcus evans lessons learned for navigating O&M expenses:

What are the main points that plants need to cover in their outage cost baselines and budgets?

JK: For a centralized team to come to a plant and assist with the planned outages, communication, timing and preparation are the keys. That is not always easy since we are constantly juggling outages from multiple outage seasons at any one time. This work load combined with the geographic diversity of our fleet does not allow us to be physically present at the plants as much as we would like during the planning phases of an outage. 

The plants are working on outage scope very early on, before we really have a chance to fully engage.  It is important for us to at least meet with them before that step so we can request that they develop their work in a manner that makes it more efficient to get good data back out of our systems.  For instance, coding work in our CMMS a certain way, helps us to run useful reports on status and cost. 

Within a plant, who decides how to track costs?

JK: Our outage management group does not manage projects, just the outage process and data.  Therefore, we help develop, collect and assimilate data for the work that is going on, and the project owners own the costs for their projects.  For capital work, there is a defined project owner that should know his or her project better than anyone and can forecast cost to complete. 

It is more complicated for BOP O&M work.  Depending on the level of project breakdown, there can be hundreds or thousands of activities to complete during an outage.  That work might be done by plant maintenance personnel or a contractor, but there generally is not one person that is following each activity and creating an update or forecast for that work. 

Joe Kimlinger, P.E. is the Director – Outage Management for Dynegy and resides in the St. Louis metro area.

Join Joe at the 15^th Outage Management for Power Plants Conference, July 26-28, 2016 at the Astor Crowne Plaza in New Orleans.

Contact:  Tyler Kelch, [email protected]

Logo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160517/368864LOGO

SOURCE marcus evans