Email Jim at jim.thompson@ipulpmedia.com

Last week, we talked about planning. I am just moving on down the schedule this week to "Check Out and Commissioning."

The potential for screwups here is as great as in planning. Bring in a fresh OCD person to manage these functions.

Of course, you want to have planned construction so that systems are released for check out and commissioning, not a section of this pipe or that pipe. You can check out and commission systems but not chunks of systems.

STOP. LOTO (Lock Out Tag Out) becomes important here, for you are going to have systems that are energized and systems that are not. It is important to have a robust LOTO system in place and everyone trained in how to use it. It is important to have a roving safety manager auditing it continuously, and not just first shift, if you are running a 24/7 construction project.

The very best check out and commissioning program I have seen, and it wasn't that many years ago, was all paper, not electronic. There were three different colored notebooks for each system. One contained vendor information. One contained planned and isometric drawings as well as electrical single lines. The third contained the checkoff sheets for that system, which were filled in and checked off by the engineer in charge of that system. When each book was completed, a green sticker was placed on its binding. These books were organized on shelves in a twenty-foot construction trailer. Nothing else was allowed in that trailer. You could walk in that trailer and immediately see the status of check out and commissioning.

Did that check out and commissioning exercise go perfectly? NO! There was a gear box on the top wire drive roll that had no oil in it, and it burned up in about a half hour. How it was missed, no one could figure it out. Because management had promised to make paper by a date certain, they pulled the box (the spare had not arrived yet) and sent it to a machine shop where they worked 24 hours straight to cut new gears, make a new shaft and replace the bearings.

The mill made the promised date.

A special note about tissue machines. Due to the direct to retail market nature of tissue, combined with the inability of tissue machines to drastically turn down their running speeds, tissue machines need more commissioning effort than, say, containerboard machines. When one throws fiber on a tissue machine, it needs to be ready to run at nearly name plate speed. And--sales needs to have done their homework so that tissue can be converted and shipped almost immediately.

Be safe and we will talk next week.

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