From foreman to planner: what operators gain when practitioners plan

When a shutdown is short of a planner, two kinds of profile usually turn up. One kind knows SAP and Primavera but has never opened a flange. The other knows the plant from the inside but has never built a work package on screen. What is needed is the person in between – and that person is rare on the labour market.

A role without vocational training

Technical planning and scheduling in turnarounds bring two worlds together: knowing how a plant is built and how the trades work together, and the methods that turn this into a plan. Technical planning means preparing every single job so that it can be carried out without queries – it is often also called work preparation. Scheduling combines these jobs into a sequence for the entire shutdown. There is no vocational training that teaches both. Those who can do it have learned it over years of plant shutdowns.

This very generation is now retiring. According to calculations by the German Economic Institute (Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft), around 1.3 million people will leave the workforce every year until 2036, while only about 800,000 will join it. In a field with no formal training, this gap will not close by itself.

What a practitioner plans differently

Anyone who has erected scaffolding or pulled a shell-and-tube heat exchanger bundle plans a work package differently from someone who only knows it from the drawing. We see three differences particularly often in our projects:

• The plan reckons with the plant. Access, lifting gear, waiting time for work permits: those who know these things set realistic durations.
• Dependencies show up earlier. A practitioner spots in the work package that insulators, scaffolders and pipefitters all want to work in the same spot – not only once it becomes a clash on shift.
• The crew accepts the plan. Supervisors and foremen are more likely to follow a plan when it comes from someone who knows what the work in the plant looks like.

A job that normally takes one day often takes two and a half in a turnaround – purely because of coordination, mutual dependencies and work permits.

That is how we described it in our report on the turnaround in Leuna. This friction cannot be avoided entirely, but it can be planned for – and it is best planned for by someone who has experienced it first-hand.

How we develop these people

Because we cannot find them on the market in sufficient numbers, we have trained them ourselves in the ep-cm Academy since 2015. We have trained more than 80 employees there, mainly in turnaround planning, scheduling, cost control and project control. Training takes place in Gelsenkirchen in groups of three to five participants.

For this we specifically look for experienced practitioners: site supervisors, foremen, rigging foremen and technicians with a good technical understanding. They bring the plant, we add the method and the tools. The trainers work in turnarounds and projects themselves, and the examples in the course are real cases. We train for our own team: those who complete the Academy then work in our turnaround teams – and so for our clients.

More than your own work package

Good planners know more than their own jobs. They understand how a turnaround works as a whole. That is why, alongside planning methods, the Academy also teaches what happens around planning:

• The whole sequence. From definition through planning, preparation and execution to start-up and closeout – and which decisions are made in which phase.
• Scope and scope freeze. How work gets into the scope, how it is assessed and why changes after the freeze are the hardest to plan in.
• The trades. Piping, equipment such as columns, heat exchangers and vessels, electrical and I&C – and where they get in each other’s way in the plant.
• The tools. Maintenance systems such as SAP PM, software for technical planning and scheduling programs such as Primavera P6 or MS Project.
• Occupational safety, process safety and work permits. How permits, gas testing and isolation management shape the sequence.
• Execution. Measuring progress every shift, spotting deviations and taking corrective action.

Anyone who joins us first has a technical interview with people who do this work themselves. We ask about specific work packages: how was a heat exchanger replacement prepared, what dependencies were there, what went differently from the plan? Answers like these reveal experience faster than a CV.

Where the limits are

The Academy turns experienced practitioners into good planners. It does not turn anyone into a turnaround manager within a few months. Anyone who leads a large shutdown or is responsible for planning an entire refinery needs years in such roles. For these positions we deploy our senior turnaround specialists or experienced specialists from our network. In the long run, graduates of our Academy should also grow into these roles.

Even good training does not replace induction at your site: every new person learns your plant standards, permit procedures and contacts with you. Plan time for this – part of it can be brought forward digitally, for example with Onboarding Excellence. And if a role lies outside what our network can cover, we say so openly.

What this means for you as an operator

• Planners who are already on the team. Our technical departments grow not only through the labour market but through our own training – even when the market is empty.
• Vetted by practitioners. At ep-cm, a scheduler is interviewed by a scheduler, a technical planner by someone who writes work packages themselves, and by the heads of the relevant specialist departments.
• A common standard. Our planners all work with the same methods. That counts as soon as several people work together in your organisation.
• Continuity. Our staff turnover has been very low for years. Whoever got to know your plant in the last shutdown is often available again for the next one.

Conclusion

The bottleneck in a turnaround is rarely the tools; it is people who master both the plant and the method. These people can be trained – ideally from those who already know the plant. For you as an operator, this means planners who understand your plant and the entire course of a turnaround – and a partner who says honestly what someone is ready for and what not yet.

How we put this into practice

First and foremost, our technical departments take on planning as a service package: technical planning, scheduling and coordination of the shutdown from a single source – and we answer for the result. If you need individual specialists in your own organisation instead, we provide them through Staffing, as temporary agency work, under a service contract or by direct placement. And if you want to build this knowledge within your own team, we also teach the same content to client teams – in-house with your plants and schedules, at our locations or alongside a project.

Does your next shutdown need technical planning and scheduling – as a service package or to reinforce your team? Get in touch – we will respond within one working day and look at your situation together.

Sources: German Economic Institute (Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft), press release of 15 June 2026 (“Babyboomer in Rente: Bis 2036 fehlen 4,3 Millionen Arbeitskräfte” – baby boomers retiring: 4.3 million workers missing by 2036) · Turnaround Leuna 2025 (ep-cm Blog) · Staffing and Academy service pages (ep-cm.com)