Your shutdown runs on people. Your system only knows companies.

Dear reader,

Your gate knows who comes in. Your procurement department knows which company you have approved. Nobody compares either of them with today’s work permit.

That is not carelessness. It is architecture. Access control sits with security, competency data with HSE and the shutdown team, and the permit is written by operations. Three systems, three owners, no connection. The risk emerges precisely where they do not meet.

A qualified contractor with a subcontractor may be an unqualified crew with a qualified invoice.

Your control is weakest when you know the most

Look at when you check what.

A contractor’s qualification is assessed months in advance. At that point, the scope is not yet 100% defined, you do not yet know the tasks in sufficient detail, and therefore you do not yet know which specific skills you will need. You carry out a thorough check with the least information.

The person actually carrying out the work only shows up on the morning of the shutdown itself. Only then do you know exactly what the task is, in which area, and next to which other activities. All the information is there. And that is when you check the least, because it is seven o’clock and two hundred people are waiting.

Your control effort is inversely proportional to the information you have.

There is a second imbalance on top of that. A competency certificate is a statement about the past: this person passed a test at some point. A work permit is a statement about today: this person is performing this task, here, now. There is no mandatory check between the two. Not in your procedures, not in most software packages, and in practice not in anyone’s job description.

JRC Minerva, the European Commission’s information portal, documented an LPG incident at a food processing site. No written procedure, a contractor without accreditation for that type of work, no proper risk assessment, non-certified equipment in a hazardous area, insufficient supervision. Five shortcomings, all upstream of the person holding the tools.

Investigations usually start with the last person in the chain. The authority to carry out the work sits in a procurement assessment made months earlier. How accurate was that file?

Hidden truthA dashboard that turns green mainly measures the completeness of the documents submitted, not whether the people involved are actually qualified to carry out the work. Those two remain aligned for months, and then, one morning, they do not. That is when your incident happens.

Three abnormal conditions at once

A turnaround is a situation in which you are operating under three abnormal conditions simultaneously.

The installation is out of service. Safety systems are often disabled, blind flanges are installed where process pressure would normally be present, and safeguards that protect you for the rest of the year are deliberately switched off.

The execution crew is not your own. VNCI Chemie Magazine documented that during the last major shutdown at LyondellBasell in Botlek, there were 1,600 external workers compared with 250 employees of the company itself. Forty-five contractor companies, twenty-four nationalities, 46,000 planned activities, 220,000 cubic metres of scaffolding. Nearly 86 percent of the people opening up the installation were not company employees.

And the time pressure is something you created yourself. It is in the shutdown plan, not in the laws of physics.

Every safety system on your site is designed to handle one of these conditions at a time. Your procedures assume trained people who know your installation. Your emergency plan assumes people who know their way around. Does your supervision ratio account for normal staffing or shutdown staffing?

Strategic insightU telt de risico’s van een turnaround meestal op. Ze vermenigvuldigen.

The shutdowns nobody adds up

Every site has one shutdown that gets everything. The site-wide shutdown, with its own steering committee, management involvement and years of preparation. It usually goes well, precisely because everyone knows it is exceptional.

Alongside it, the same site runs a series of smaller shutdowns every year. A few hundred execution hours. A schedule, a permit, and someone hoping it all goes well.

Add those small shutdowns together over ten years. In terms of the hours external workers are exposed to an installation operating outside its design condition, they easily exceed the major shutdown.

Your governance is entirely focused on that one major event.

Strategic insightUw risico is verspreid, uw beheersing is geconcentreerd. Dat is geen veiligheidsprobleem, dat is een verdelingsfout. En verdelingsfouten los je niet op met meer inspanning op dezelfde plek.

The number that survives, and the number that holds up

At every turnaround kick-off, safety comes first, with quality close behind. There is little debate about that.

The number that sticks after the kick-off is not about safety. You often hear that 80 percent of turnarounds are about budget. Check it. You will not find the source. The figure is attributed to a consultancy, sometimes to two at once, but no original study, sample or methodology has ever been published. Whoever quotes it is quoting another vendor, not research.

There is, however, a figure with a name and a date. AP-Networks, an American turnaround benchmarking firm, published in 2021 that more than two thirds of turnarounds exceed the planned budget or schedule by at least ten percent, or experience a trip after start-up. Forty percent exceed the budget or schedule by more than thirty percent.

Why this mattersNotice the difference. The unsupported figure is only about money. The sourced figure puts a trip after start-up on the same footing as a budget overrun, safety alongside money, in the same breath. Safety comes first at your kick-off and in the figure that stands up to scrutiny. It only disappears from the figure that is easiest to repeat.

Scope wordt beslist in euro’s en betaald in blootstellingsuren

In May 2025, Perfact Group described a Dutch turnaround project. The list contained 1,850 work packages. After review, 500 turned out to be unnecessary. Twenty-seven percent, removed before a single flange had been opened.

Turnaround specialist Bob Rajh: “A hard scope freeze sounds logical, but when the pressure increases, we still see things being added.”

In my career, I have seen few hard scope freezes behave the way they were supposed to on paper. They exist much like New Year’s resolutions do: there are always all kinds of valid reasons to add work to, or remove it from, the scope list.

Now consider the calculation that is rarely made. Those 500 work packages are not just a budget issue, they are also people. Every package added or removed represents a number of man-hours more or fewer for someone who does not know your installation, at the busiest time of the year.

Strategic insightIf you do not challenge the scope list, you are making a safety decision without realising it. It is the cheapest risk reduction you have, and it is being booked to the wrong department.

What the European figures tell us

EU-OSHA estimates that 10 to 20 percent of all occupational accidents in European countries are related to maintenance, and 10 to 15 percent of fatal accidents. Belgium was around 15 percent in 2022, while Finland was at 18 to 19 percent.

One French figure stands out. Fourteen percent of fatal accidents are related to machine maintenance. Include major maintenance and that figure rises to 44 percent.

Major maintenance. That is a turnaround, under a more respectable name.

For temporary agency work in Belgium, the frequency rate was 41.7 in 2022, or 3.2 times the private-sector average. In 2023 it fell to 35.70, the lowest level since 1998. The private-sector average was 12.66 in 2024. Construction, which everyone considers dangerous, stands at 26.33.

Temporary workers therefore have a higher accident frequency than the sector we instinctively consider the most dangerous. Not because these people are less capable, but because they do not know the site. EU-OSHA lists the causes, and none of them concern professional competence: unfamiliar surroundings, unclear responsibilities between organisations, language barriers, conflicting safety cultures, and equipment that introduces risks for your permanent workforce.

During a turnaround, you generally do not work with temporary agency workers but with qualified contractors. Yet these are precisely the same causes you encounter there.

Notice that every cause concerns the person, not the company you qualified.

This is not a Dutch problem, nor a Belgian problem. It is the same problem on both sides of the border, and the Benelux largely draws from the same contractor pool. The Netherlands has approximately 415 Brzo companies, while Belgium has around 380 Seveso establishments. During the 2022 Dutch inspection round, at least one violation was identified at 55 percent of the companies inspected. The most common direct cause across the board: errors in human behaviour.

That conclusion is usually read as criticism of the person carrying out the work. It means something else. If human behaviour is systematically the direct cause within a population you largely hire, you do not have a staffing problem. You have a system problem, and you repeat it every year.

The legislator is already where your organisation is not

In many organisations, contractor management sits with procurement. Seveso III says something different.

Annex III of Directive 2012/18/EU requires the safety management system to address “the involvement of employees and subcontractors’ personnel working in the establishment”. Procedures for identifying major hazards must include “outsourced activities”. Training must be provided to all personnel working in the establishment, “including relevant subcontractors’ personnel”.

Read the word that appears three times: personnel. Not companies.

Framework Directive 89/391/EEC adds the duty to coordinate: where several companies share the same workplace, employers must cooperate, coordinate their measures and inform one another. In Belgium, the Codex goes further. The workplace information sheet is an obligation to achieve a specific result. If it is missing, that in itself constitutes an offence. Not “we did our best during a busy shutdown”.

Nor should you think that the Belgian inspectorate is not there yet. The FPS Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue inspection tool for inspection and maintenance requires that, for critical activities, it is established who carries them out, which qualifications are required, and that there is evidence that the people concerned actually possess those qualifications. When the work is carried out by third parties, the establishment must regularly verify that it is being performed correctly.

Who, which qualification, what evidence. It is already on the inspection form.

Hidden truthThe legislator has already placed the obligation at the level of the individual for more than ten years. Most organisations still manage it at company level. That gap is not a compliance backlog. That is your liability.

The boring road to excellence

I am the last person to slow down technology.

Digital twins will significantly improve the quality of preparation and risk assessment for modifications, and I already see many initiatives that eliminate the need to enter confined spaces. Digital and AI tools for monitoring people in confined spaces are also developing rapidly. Every innovation brings us closer to a more efficient shutdown. I am genuinely enthusiastic about that.

But no digital twin will solve what goes wrong when the person at the gate presents a valid company certificate and a qualification that nobody checked against the task that morning.

The shutdowns that succeed are the ones where the freeze was genuinely a freeze. Where a risk-based review removed work instead of rewriting it. Where qualifications were established for each person and each task before mobilisation. Where the same permit discipline applies at two in the morning on day nine as it does at eight in the morning on day one.

And where the evaluation, the lessons learned, genuinely takes place afterwards. That is the most important moment of the entire shutdown for me: the key opportunity to improve future shutdowns, and at the same time the moment when the people involved have already left for the next shutdown. This is ultimately a people business. It requires an open culture and a commitment to continuous improvement. It is probably the only part that cannot be automated.

Nobody issues a press release about that. There is no cake for a scope freeze that held. The person who saves your turnaround does so during preparation, in discussions with management, in a meeting room, and at that moment, they are unpopular.

Most sites already know all of this. The problem is not knowledge. The problem is that scope discipline creates a visible conflict in month three, while the cost of not enforcing it only becomes visible in month nine. By then, the conflict has been settled and the winner has moved on to another project.

The question to take with you this week

Take the last shutdown you ran. Pull out one work permit at random.

Can you prove that every person’s qualification listed on that permit was valid that morning and appropriate for that task in that zone, and who checked it?

If you can only prove it at company level, you now know where your next investigation will end.

Werner Van Acker, Maintenance Expert Essenscia Proces Academie

Turnaround Shutdown Training and BEMAS

Werner.vanacker@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/wernervanacker

Contractor Strategists

Sources

“We raden Onyx One zonder twijfel aan! Heel wat van onze huiscontractoren werkten al met het systeem en dit heeft ons overtuigd. We zijn tevreden over het platform en over de samenwerking.”

Fons Huybrechts
Operationeel Preventie Adviseur – Bayer Agriculture bv

“Onyx One significantly improved our contractor management. All documents and certificates are now tracked automatically. It is a user-friendly system and they have a strong service desk.”

Diana De Peuter
Finance and IT Manager – Monument Chemical bv

“We have excellent safety training (e-Learning) for the contractors through Onyx One and the cooperation is running smoothly.”

Luc Dejonghe
HSSE Manager – Shell Catalysts & Technologies Belgium N.V.