Helping RWE nPower minimise costly downtime

A power station that’s not working can be extremely costly! So an essential aspect of operating them is to carefully manage ‘outages’ – the times when a station, or one of its components, is taken ‘offline’ and out of production, for scheduled maintenance and repair to minimise costly downtime.

RWE nPower chose CITI to tailor and deliver a suite of project management courses and sponsor briefings with emphasis on driving a consistent, project management based approach to managing outages.

Good project management is essential to achieving this objective. By focusing on each outage as a project, rather than a series of processes, the company could focus on the most important thing; ensuring that a set of management actions existed within the outage strategy to deal with risks and issues.

RWE npower is seeing measurable benefits, with a positive financial impact, as outage times are optimised and further streamlined in an effort to minimise costly downtime. There is also a much better understanding, and therefore synergy, between sponsors and their project managers. CITI continues to work within the energy production and distribution industry to this day.