Discover the hidden reasons why turnaround costs overrun their budgets

Turnaround Managers, Planners and Estimators are cordially invited to a no-cost presentation that explores how InterPlan Systems’ planning and estimating standards can help overcome the hidden causes of turnaround budget overruns.

This is a two hour presentation by Dick Ertl, InterPlan Systems. Seating is limited and reservations are required.

When: Thursday, September 26 at 1pm
Where: Friendswood, Texas (please inquire and/or register for exact address)

Please confirm your attendance by contacting InterPlan Systems today.

Free eBook Provides Turnaround Management Insights from Decades of Experience

Now available: Our Turnarounds is a free ebook describing a turnarounds that InterPlan Systems has assisted in planning and managing. They are dissected for your benefit – learn the true causes for the way turnarounds were torpedoed so you can detect early warning signs of budget overruns or missing schedule goals.

Our Turnarounds is available now. Request your free copy right now by email or phone: 281-482-7126.

Price Increase Coming in 2024 – Lock in Maintenance and Support Now

InterPlan Systems is proud to serve the industry with extremely reasonable pricing on our software licensing. We have not raised our prices in years, but next year we will. InterPlan Systems will be increasing licensing costs for ATC Professional and eTaskMaker on February 1, 2024 as follows:

• ATC Professional – Site licenses will increase from $10,000 to $15,000. Seat licenses will increase from $1,000 to $2,000.
• eTaskMaker – Site licenses will increase from $5,000 to $7,500. Seat licenses will increase from $1,000 to $1,500.

Annual maintenance and support fees for ATC Professional and eTaskMaker licenses are 15% of current licensing costs, so the February 1, 2024 price increase will also increase clients’ maintenance and support fees.

We highly recommend that clients lock in current pricing for maintenance and support before the price increase on February 1, 2024.

eTaskMaker 2.0 in 2024

We have been hard at work developing the next major upgrade to the eTaskMaker planning and estimating system. eTaskMaker 2.0 is likely to be released early in 2024 and it will feature a bunch of important improvements including (but not limited to):

• A module library publishing and licensing system – Anyone will be able to develop libraries of eTaskMaker modules that can be licensed to eTaskMaker users.
• Modules 2.0 – Enhanced module definitions can incorporate tables, nested variables, custom codes and more. Modules in eTaskMaker 2.0 will be easier than ever to design and have much greater flexibility to model plans and power to estimate manhours.
• Module customization – Additional features will make it trivially easy to customize generic modules for specific equipment
• Estimate libraries – Save estimates to a turnaround/project file for later editing, batch exporting or reporting
• New Reports – Analyze or review your scope and manhour/cost estimates for entire turnarounds/projects

We plan to release more details as we get closer to the product release.

ATC Pro 2.0 Development Interrupted

It’s been a few years since we last published any news on the development of ATC Professional 2.0. We spent the better part of 2019 hard at work on the effort. We elected not to exhibit at any of the industry trade shows that we normally attend as we wanted to finish and debut ATC Pro 2.0 the next time we participated.

Then, in 2020, Covid-19 happened. Trade shows either stopped or went virtual. Our in house development efforts continued albeit with extra challenges.

We got ATC Pro 2.0 roughly 95% functional but there were a few issues that, while functional, did not meet our expectations for acceptable performance. We have spent considerable effort on solving these issues, but it became increasingly clear that to develop ATC Pro 2.0 to it’s full potential, we were going to have to re-work a few fundamental things and the timeline for a release candidate was going to get pushed significantly.

We made a strategic decision to suspend development efforts on ATC Pro 2.0 in favor of eTaskMaker 2.0 which had spent far too long on the back burner while ATC Pro 2.0 efforts had been underway. ATC Pro 2.0 development efforts will resume pending the release of eTaskMaker 2.0. We are confident that when ATC Pro 2.0 is ready for release, you will agree that it was worth the wait to get it right.

ATC Professional Updates

A new update for ATC Professional is now available. This update includes:

• Enhanced Summary Bar Chart Report – You can now summarize the Bar Chart report by any of the work order level coding fields (Unit/Area, Equipment, AFE or Supervisors). The new summarizing options are available by using the “Zoom” toolbar button.
• Excel Data Import – The “Import from SAP” option imports work order data from Excel formatted files. This feature has been expanded to allow importation of all ATC work order level coding fields. Details have been included in the Import from SAP.txt documentation.
• Excel Data Import – Fixed an issue that truncated data prematurely during an import of a large data set.

New eTaskMaker Module

InterPlan Systems has released the following new eTaskMaker estimating module:

• Heat Exchangers – Steam Sparged Water Bath Vaporizer – (new) This heat exchanger module is based on the Linde lox backup vaporizer design, that consists of a U-tube exchanger with a second bundle that consists of three u-tube (hairpin) tubes.

eTaskMaker clients may now download the update from our downloads repository.

Don’t waste your 2018 budgets

As we approach the end of the year, InterPlan Systems would like to remind managers with funds remaining in their 2018 budgets that we offer a range of useful tools for their organizations. This is a great time to pick up a few eTaskMaker licenses or STO Handbooks.

Preventable Turnaround Budget Overruns

Now available: a study that reveals the nature and causes of turnaround budget overruns. There are two main categories: preventable (or avoidable), and non-avoidable. The study reveals the causes of a substantial portion of budget overruns, and points to a solution, which can be implemented easily and quickly.

So many failed turnaround “post-mortems” aka “lessons learned” fail to identify the root causes of budget overruns. This is because there is a
reliance on traditional practices, that fail to address the true nature of cost control. Doing the same thing over and over again every
turnaround will guarantee disastrous result.

Our documents will shed light on this problem and point to proven solutions. They are free for the asking. Contact us today by email or phone: 281-482-7126.

eTaskMaker Module Update for October

InterPlan Systems has released the following updated eTaskMaker estimating module:

• Block Valve – Welded (Rev. 24) – (updated) Adds an option for valves with a rating up to 1,500 #.

eTaskMaker clients may now download the update from our downloads repository.