The Problem Nobody Talks About
Ask two experienced planners to estimate the same shutdown job. You'll get two different answers. Sometimes wildly different.
It happens in every organisation. It happens regardless of industry — refining, chemicals, power generation, food and beverage, mining. It happens even when both planners have decades of experience.
This is not a skills problem. It is a systems problem.
Every planner carries their own mental model of how long a job takes, how many people it needs, and what it costs. That model is built on experience — their experience. Their previous shutdowns. Their preferred contractors. Their sense of what's achievable under pressure.
Without a common baseline, two experienced planners estimating the same job will produce two different work packs. And when you are running a planning team of five, ten, or fifteen people across a major turnaround, that variability compounds across hundreds — sometimes thousands — of work orders.
What This Actually Costs You
The consequences are not abstract.
When estimates vary across the planning team, your schedule is built on a distribution of assumptions rather than a single, consistent baseline. Labour resource curves are distorted. Material requirements fluctuate depending on who planned the job. Cost models lose credibility.
Leadership teams learn — quickly — that the planning numbers cannot be trusted. They apply informal contingency. They push back on forecasts. They stop relying on the data and start managing by instinct.
The planners, meanwhile, carry the weight of a system that was never designed to give them consistent results.
“Once a planning team has more than one person, estimates of effort and cost range widely between each human.”
The Root Cause
The problem is not that planners estimate differently because they are poor at their jobs. It is that most STO planning environments offer no mechanism to enforce a common standard.
Norms-based estimation — using industry-validated benchmarks for labour hours, crew sizes, and durations — has existed for decades. But in practice, those norms live in spreadsheets, in documents that have not been updated since the last major turnaround, or simply in experienced heads that are no longer in the room. Planners default to what they know.
The result is a planning process that is, at its core, dependent on the individual sitting at the keyboard.
What AI Changes
AI doesn’t replace the planner’s judgment. It gives every planner the same starting point.
iPlanSTO’s AI planning engine — iPlanAI — is trained on decades of industrial maintenance norms, productivity factors, and engineering standards. From a work description, it generates structured job steps, trade allocations, crew sizes, manhour estimates, duration forecasts, and material requirements. In seconds. View YouTube Video Preview.
Every planner on the team is estimating against the same baseline. Every work order is evaluated against the same logic. Human bias, experience variation, and tribal knowledge gaps — standardised out of the process.
Planners retain full control. They edit, refine, and override AI outputs. The difference is that they are starting from a defensible, consistent baseline — not from a blank page.
The Outcome
Standardised estimating across the STO. Accelerated planning productivity. Workforce utilisation that reflects what was actually planned — not what was guessed.
And perhaps most importantly: planning data that schedulers and leadership teams can actually trust.
Not because planners have suddenly become more consistent. But because the system they are working in finally gives them the tools to be.
iPlanSTO is purpose-built Shutdown, Turnaround & Outage performance software. To find out more, VIEW BROCHURE or contact jonswift@iamtech.com.
About the Author: Ross Coulman is the Managing Director of IAMTech, a global leader in industrial asset management and technology solutions. With over 20 years of experience in the sector, Ross has driven IAMTech’s growth from a start-up to a trusted partner for the oil, gas, chemical, and power industries worldwide. Passionate about innovation and sustainability, he champions the use of digital transformation to enhance efficiency, safety, and compliance across complex industrial operations.
