Think Slow. Act Fast. How Planning Saved ~$100+ Million in a Shutdown
By the time a project reaches a turnaround, it’s usually too late to be creative. Every hour matters. Every decision is magnified, and every surprise costs real money. This is where experience shows up, not in theory, but in execution.
Back in 2022, mainstay was engaged to support a project at one of saskatchewan’s potash operations involving the replacement of secondary and tertiary cyclones. As the project moved through early design, preliminary estimating, and scheduling, the initial conclusion was clear: the work would require an eight-week outage to complete. That duration defined the critical path for the shutdown.
Asking the Right Questions Early
Early on, Mainstay and the client began asking a different question:
How do we shorten the outage? Not by cutting corners and not by increasing risk, but by shifting work out of the critical path and into the months leading up to the shutdown.
The initial concept focused on modularization, building as much as possible in advance to reduce installation time during the outage itself. That analysis showed some opportunity, but also a limitation. Without changes to the existing facility or infrastructure, a significant portion of the work would still need to be installed at elevation, approximately 50 feet above grade. That meant congestion, complexity, and risk during the outage.
At that point, Mainstay pushed for a different way of thinking.
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Think Slow. Act Fast.
Instead of accepting the facility as-is, we asked:
What if we prepared the space ahead of time?
What if obstructions were moved months in advance?
What if airlines, piping, and structural elements were temporarily relocated through planned mini-outages?
What if more of the equipment could be fully assembled at ground level, where access, safety, and quality control are dramatically better?
This approach wasn’t immediately embraced.
The engineer at the time (not Mainstay) was reluctant, not because the idea lacked merit, but because it pushed beyond the original constructability assumptions. Shortly after, the engineering firm changed due to capacity constraints. The new engineer arrived with similar reservations.
At the same time, this project became one of the site’s first to pursue early contractor engagement. A contractor was brought in early to review scope, methodology, constructability, and pricing. Their initial feedback echoed the same concerns:
It can’t be done.
It can’t be done safely.
The equipment won’t fit.
The door isn’t wide enough.
There isn’t enough headroom.
There is no steel to hoist from.
We heard all of it, but experience teaches you when to keep going…
Experience Sees Options Others Miss
When you’ve been around enough outages, you stop seeing barriers as fixed.
Doors can be removed. Openings can be enlarged. Bollards can be cut and reinstated.
Airlines and other obstacles can be rerouted months in advance. Steel can be removed and it can be added. None of this happens by accident. It requires planning, coordination, and early commitment, but it’s all achievable and that’s the path Mainstay chose.
By preparing the area well ahead of the outage, we enabled significantly more ground-level pre-assembly. And that decision paid off almost immediately.
During fit-up on the ground, alignment issues were discovered, issues that would have taken several additional weeks to resolve at elevation during the outage. Because the work was already de-risked and accessible, those problems were identified and resolved before the shutdown even began. Resolving these issues on the ground took approximately three weeks.
Had these been discovered during the outage, the original plan would have extended by at least four weeks; pushing the shutdown out to approximately twelve weeks.
The Real Cost of Not Planning
When the shutdown was complete, the outage duration was reduced from an originally planned eight weeks to approximately five weeks, recovering roughly 21 days of production. This is a conservative view, as the original plan was trending toward an additional four weeks once field realities were encountered.
At an average production value of approximately $5 million per day, those recovered days represent about $105 million in avoided lost production.
Had the alignment issues been discovered during the outage, as the original plan suggested, the shutdown would likely have extended toward twelve weeks, increasing lost production exposure well beyond this figure.
Achieving this required additional preparatory work, relocating infrastructure, planning targeted mini-outages, and assembling equipment in advance, at a cost of less than $1 million.
The result wasn’t acceleration during the shutdown. It was the outcome of early critical thinking, constructability planning, and a willingness to challenge the original outage assumptions.
This Is How Mainstay Works
This project is a clear example of what we mean when we say think slow, act fast.
We slowed down early.
We challenged assumptions.
We used experience to see what others couldn’t yet see.
And when the outage arrived, execution was fast, controlled, and predictable.
This isn’t about being clever in the moment. It’s about doing the hard thinking before the clock starts, planning early, engaging the right people sooner than later, and structuring projects so execution isn’t left to chance.
This is what predictable execution looks like when planning leads the work, not the other way around.
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