Interview with Jörg Pläster on contractor guidelines for plant shutdowns, lessons learned, and structured turnaround management.
Plant shutdowns rank among the most demanding projects in the process industry: hundreds of contractors working in parallel under extreme time and cost pressure – while safety and quality remain non-negotiable at every stage. This is precisely where structured guidelines and checklists make the difference.
Issue 67 of GOOD TO KNOW! features the second part of our interview with Jörg Pläster – a shutdown and turnaround expert with nearly 50 years of hands-on experience in the process industry, formerly at Evonik and now consulting at Weber Rohrleitungsbau. Drawing on a VDI guideline he helped develop, Pläster created a practical six-phase contractor framework for plant shutdowns that gives both operators and service providers a shared structure to work from.
In the interview, he explains why responsibility between operator and contractor is not a rigid division, but a continuous dialogue – and why lessons learned are not a nice-to-have, but a critical driver of continuous improvement in turnaround management.