Envision utilizing AI to automate tedious scheduling tasks and optimization, empowering your turnaround team to focus on high-value activities such as simulating different execution strategies. Imagine automating the mitigation of dozens of labor, equipment, and risk scenarios before they occur, creating a data-driven project plan that’s adaptable to change. This vision is realized through ALICE Core, the groundbreaking generative scheduling platform transforming turnarounds and complex industrial projects.
The Turnaround Challenge: A Race Against Time
It’s well known that turnarounds are among the most challenging projects to manage. Even with top-tier planners and schedulers, these projects experience extraordinary challenges and managing them can be quite a balancing act. The team attempts to balance scope growth to avoid excessive downtime while ensuring operational integrity and reliability are addressed. Limited labor resources strain productivity, yet excess resources inflate costs. Late deliveries or discoveries in the field force last-minute adjustments, jeopardizing project plans.
Why are turnarounds so complex to manage? Traditional planning methods struggle to simulate and mitigate these decisions accurately, resulting in a rigid schedule, unpredictable turnaround costs, and low-confidence duration estimates. ALICE seeks to mitigate this by leveraging AI and generative scheduling to automate project simulation and optimization, creating faster and more resilient schedules.
Unleashing Innovation: ALICE's Generative Scheduling Solution, ALICE Core
Geared towards complex industrial projects, ALICE Core allows users to seamlessly upload a P6 schedule and begin simulating and optimizing within minutes. With each what-if scenario, ALICE’s proprietary algorithm automatically reallocates resources and re-sequences the schedule within all defined project constraints to minimize project duration and maximize resource efficiency. The result is a suite of optimized, cost and resource-loaded schedules to evaluate for each scenario. This automation and rapid simulation process, coined as optioneering, enables your turnaround team to focus on high-value activities such as simulating different shutdown and construction sequences, evaluating different resourcing strategies, and mitigating project risks such as scope growth and procurement delays. This fosters not only a faster project schedule with an optimized cost and duration, but an anti-fragile one that’s more flexible to react to unexpected changes.
Stories of Success: ALICE Core in Action
It’s no secret that turnarounds are a significant expense to your business due to the production downtime and the associated construction costs, so what kind of benefits can you expect from ALICE? Companies using ALICE have seen up to a 100x improvement in decision-making efficiency, allowing project teams to explore more optimization strategies. On average, these optimizations lead to a 17% reduction in total project duration, 14% labor cost savings, and 12% construction equipment cost savings, all the while enhancing the team's confidence in the project plan.
In one notable turnaround case study, a customer utilizing ALICE achieved a 12% reduction in its overall turnaround duration by simulating multiple paths of construction, critical paths, and resourcing strategies. Through this exploration of multiple critical paths, an opportunity was revealed to increase the availability of a key resource and open significantly more work fronts, ultimately achieving the duration savings. In this example, the optioneering process unveiled a faster and more achievable execution strategy that would have been too costly or time-prohibitive to evaluate and find with traditional scheduling methods.
ALICE’s proprietary algorithm can also automate the mitigation of anticipated risks such as procurement delays, resource limitations, and added work scope by automatically redistributing resources and finding new paths of construction to minimize duration. This is generative scheduling in action.
Join the Movement: Don't Miss the New Era of Turnaround and Project Planning
ALICE Core is evolving the landscape of turnaround optimization. Join the movement and enhance your competitive edge as we navigate towards an era of enhanced efficiency, adaptability, and dependability in project planning.