STOAR · Turnaround Assurance Review
Know your turnaround's real health, before it costs you the restart date.
Funding is released on a readiness picture built by the same team that owns the outcome. STOAR gives you an independent, evidence-based read at every gate, so the risks that move a restart date surface while there is still time to act.
The guide who has sat in the seat, on both sides of the table.
The problem
An authoritative-looking plan is not the same as a ready one.
Most turnaround plans get approved because they look complete, not because anyone stress-tested the logic underneath. A schedule with broken logic is a paper map in a nice frame: right up until the route changes, and by then the restart date is already moving. On a single-train unit the whole asset is dark during the outage, so every day of slip is direct lost production. The gap you cannot see is the one that surfaces mid-execution.
By the time trouble is obvious in the field, the levers to fix it cheaply are already gone.
Self-assessed readiness has no independent check, so optimism and blind spots pass straight through.
A sequencing fault baked in months ago surfaces mid-outage, and the window you committed to is gone.
Your guide
We have sat in the seat, on both sides of the table.
STO Intelligence is an independent assurance partner, founder-led by 25 years across refining, petrochemicals, and LNG, as the owner accountable for the outcome and as the consultant brought in to protect it.
Our methods stay at public-framework level, DCMA 14-point, GAO, AACE, and PMI, so every finding is defensible and nothing is a black box. You own the standard, not a proprietary score you cannot see inside.
Why STO Intelligence
Empathy for the seat you are in, staking a whole plant on a schedule you cannot see inside. Authority to check it, P6 topology specialty, public frameworks, and a founder track record across the full turnaround lifecycle.
The plan
Assurance at every gate, not a single verdict at the end.
STOAR runs as an arc across the front-end loading gates and closes the loop after execution. Each review de-risks the next funding decision, and each hands the team specific, prioritized actions, not a grade.
Is the premise sound and owned?
Strategy, scope criteria, and the business case, aligned before money is committed.
Is the scope frozen and challenged?
Every work order justified, the estimate maturing, risk live and owned.
Is the plan ready to execute?
Baseline locked, packages ready, the schedule logic stress-tested, the team aligned.
What happened, and what carries forward?
STO·LEARN puts the data in the room: performance measured against the as-built, lessons converted to owned actions.
We work the execution schedule in full: topology, logic discipline, float, critical-path resilience. Deep analysis in, a prioritized correction plan out, handed to the scheduler before baseline lock so the restart date holds.
We join the baseline to the as-built: where time was won and lost, by unit and by phase, with the plan-versus-actual critical path traced. The closeout that feeds the next turnaround, not a binder that gets filed.
How it is measured
Four independent lenses. When they agree, you have evidence.
A single readiness number is one person's opinion. STOAR triangulates the human system and the technical plan. The gap between what the team believes and what the schedule shows is itself a finding.
Steering-team leadership effectiveness
Twelve observable behaviors rated by the people who see them: direction and structure, engagement, psychological safety, and integration. Consensus is scored alongside the level.
Team alignment and planning maturity
The broad team scores each readiness category and their agreement on it. A confident average that hides a split is a risk you can now name and work.
Consultant-led, gate-relative
Category to element to check, measured against what this specific gate demands, with the evidence and the confidence behind every score made explicit.
Structural integrity of the plan
The schedule's logic, float, and critical path graded against public standards, DCMA and GAO, not against a vendor's black-box tool.
The steering team's own view of its leadership, set beside the broad team's, beside the consultant's read, beside the schedule's structural score. The lenses score what the interviews gathered from every seat, so convergence is confidence and divergence is your next conversation.
How the review runs · standard on every STOAR
The interview week is gone. So is the seat nobody got to.
We still interview every seat. What is gone is the week everyone had to be in the building for. Each person takes their own interview by voice or text when it suits them, led by an AI interviewer working from that seat's own probe bank, and the consultant reads the transcript and decides what counts.
You give us the roster once. Each person takes theirs by voice or text, whenever it suits them, from their own phone.
Fifteen discipline seats, from the STO manager and the steering sponsor to the execution contractor. Nobody is dropped because the calendar was full.
It keeps probing where an answer is vague, rather than moving on to keep a room on schedule. A group session buries disagreement; a one-on-one surfaces it.
What one discipline raises is put, anonymously, to the seats not yet interviewed, so a contradiction becomes a finding instead of a footnote.
Each finding carries the argument against itself, and reaches your report only when the consultant accepts it. A finding whose evidence cannot be found in the transcript is never presented as a finding at all.
The platform
Your team answers from their phones. The room sees it build live.
No paper forms, no email survey that sits unread. In the session, everyone scans a code and responds from their own phone. The facilitator drives from a single screen, results reveal live, and the honest signal, including the quiet dissenter, shows up in the moment it can still change the plan.
Anyone who cannot attend takes the same poll before or after. It all merges into one scored result.
- Join instantly by QR code or short code, no app to install
- Live reveal, then answers lock, so the room moves together
- Word clouds and dot-voting turn open questions into shared priorities
- One result set, whether taken live or on a phone days earlier
Screens are illustrative of the STO Intelligence platform
What changes
The difference an independent read makes.
Without STOAR
- ×Readiness taken on trust, verified by no one outside the team
- ×Broken schedule logic discovered in execution, when it is expensive
- ×Slip found too late in the window to recover the date
- ×Coverage limited to whoever could make the interview week
- ×Hard-won lessons lost in the gap between one event and the next
With STOAR
- ✓Readiness proven with evidence at every gate, before you sanction
- ✓Schedule logic corrected before baseline lock, while it is cheap
- ✓Risks surfaced while there is still time and money to act on them
- ✓Every discipline interviewed, every finding traceable to a quote
- ✓Every event measured and fed forward, so the next one starts ahead
Bring an independent set of eyes to your next turnaround.
Start with a short readiness conversation. We will show you where STOAR fits your gate calendar, and what an independent read would reveal on the event you are planning now.