Turnaround time at an industrial plant is the amount of time needed to shut down a specific asset or an entire operation in order to conduct maintenance or some other process.

This period of time is often commonly called downtime, a planned outage, or a plant turnaround.

If the entire plant needs to be maintenanced, turnaround time will refer to the time the plant needs to be down while personnel conduct their maintenance work.

Put simply, turnaround times are periods in which nothing is being done—that is, when whatever a factory or plant typically produces cannot be made because an essential part of the process is offline (or the entire plant is offline, in the case of a plant turnaround).

Turnaround times are typically planned in advance.

But if a plant or operation has a sudden emergency that requires it to be taken offline, then the time personnel need to fix the issue and get the plant or asset up and running again can also be referred to as turnaround time, since it still describes the time needed to complete—or turnaround—the work required to return operations to normal.

During planned downtimes, these are some of the most common types of turnaround work:

Regular maintenance. This includes both inspections and any subsequent work performed as a result of the inspector’s findings.

Replacements of parts or entire assets.

Upgrades. These could include upgrades to energy, lighting, parts, or even entire assets in the company’s processes.

Unusual world events. This last item covers unique happenings, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which could require a temporary plant shutdown for personnel to enact new health protocols. The time needed for such procedures to be put in place could be called turnaround time, since it refers to a period of time during which the plant will be off while personnel conduct a discrete process.