Transforming Turnaround Management with Aurora and Cleopatra

The Future of Integrated Turnaround Management: Aurora + Cleopatra

Turnarounds are among the most complex and high-stakes projects organizations face. They demand precision, foresight, and agility to ensure operations are restored on time, within budget, and without compromising safety or quality. Yet, too often, turnaround teams struggle with fragmented systems: planners work in one tool, schedulers in another, and field supervisors juggle paper-based updates or disconnected spreadsheets. The result? Cost overruns, delays, and unnecessary risks.

Now imagine a world where detailed planning, intelligent scheduling, and real-time execution all operate within one seamless ecosystem. That’s exactly what the combination of Cleopatra Enterprise’s work package planning and Stottler Henke’s Aurora intelligent scheduling solution delivers. Together, they provide a fully integrated turnaround management solution—one that transforms how organizations plan, execute, and deliver.

Closing the Gap Between Planning and Execution

Traditionally, turnaround planning and scheduling live in silos. Planners create detailed work packages—defining scope, resources, and costs—while schedulers manually translate those plans into timelines. Execution teams then try to follow these static schedules, even when real-world conditions shift.

This fragmented process is where projects often falter. If equipment delivery slips, labor availability changes, or unexpected issues arise, the plan and the schedule quickly fall out of sync. Teams spend valuable time reconciling spreadsheets or making ad hoc decisions, often without a clear understanding of downstream impacts.

By combining Cleopatra’s structured work package planning with Stottler Henke’s Aurora Intelligent Scheduling solution, organizations can finally close this gap. Work packages flow directly into the scheduling engine, ensuring every task is accurately represented. And when execution conditions evolve, the schedule dynamically adapts—feeding real-time updates back into the planning environment.

What Cleopatra Brings to the Table

Cleopatra Enterprise is widely recognized for its strength in work package planning and cost management. For turnarounds, it provides:

• Detailed Scoping: Every activity, material, and resource is captured at the work package level.
• Accurate Cost Estimation: Integrated cost models ensure budgets are tied directly to planned scope.
• Resource Assignment: Labor, equipment, and materials are aligned with each task.
• Standardization: Templates and benchmarks bring consistency across large, complex projects.

With Cleopatra, turnaround teams enter execution with confidence, knowing every detail has been accounted for. But as any experienced turnaround professional knows, no matter how thorough the plan, reality has a way of introducing surprises. That’s where Aurora comes in.

The Power of Stottler Henke’s Aurora Intelligent Scheduling Solution

Stottler Henke’s Aurora Intelligent Scheduling solution has been trusted in some of the world’s most demanding industries—from aerospace to defense to energy. Aurora goes beyond traditional scheduling tools by providing AI-driven intelligence that dynamically optimizes schedules as conditions change.

Key Capabilities Include:
• Dynamic Optimization: Aurora automatically adjusts schedules to resolve conflicts and minimize delays.
• Critical Path Awareness: It highlights the activities with the most impact on overall turnaround success.
• Resource Conflict Resolution: Competing demands for labor, tools, and equipment are optimized.
• What-If Analysis: Project Managers can instantly simulate scenarios and understand their ripple effects across the project.

But Aurora doesn’t stop there. It also provides advanced risk and uncertainty analysis capabilities—through sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo simulation—that further strengthen decision-making.

Sensitivity Analysis: Understanding What Really Matters

In turnarounds, not all tasks carry equal weight. Some delays might have minimal impact, while others can ripple across the entire schedule. Aurora’s sensitivity analysis identifies which tasks, resources, or uncertainties are most likely to affect project outcomes.

• Targeted Risk Management: Teams can focus resources and contingency plans on the most critical variables.
• Smarter Decision-Making: Leaders know exactly where flexibility exists and where precision is essential.
• Increased Confidence: By understanding leverage points in the schedule, organizations can act decisively and avoid firefighting.

This insight helps managers move from reactive problem-solving to proactive risk management.

Monte Carlo Analysis: Quantifying Uncertainty

Even the best turnaround plans involve uncertainty—weather events, labor productivity variations, supply chain disruptions. Aurora’s Monte Carlo analysis provides a powerful way to quantify this uncertainty.

By running thousands of simulations, Monte Carlo analysis generates a probability distribution for turnaround outcomes:

• Realistic Forecasts: Instead of a single, overly optimistic completion date, managers see a range of possibilities with associated probabilities.
• Contingency Planning: Organizations can build buffer time and budget around statistically likely risks, not guesswork.
• Improved Stakeholder Communication: Probabilistic forecasts help executives and stakeholders understand both risks and confidence levels, reducing surprises.

This means turnaround teams don’t just plan for the expected—they’re prepared for the unexpected.

A Seamless Flow of Information

The integration between Cleopatra and Aurora ensures a continuous flow of accurate information:

1. Work packages created in Cleopatra populate directly into Aurora.
2. Aurora schedules are generated based on real scope, cost, and resource data.
3. Execution updates flow back into Cleopatra to maintain alignment with budgets and forecasts.

This closed-loop system eliminates duplication, reduces errors, and provides all stakeholders with a single source of truth.

Collaboration and Control Across the Organization

In a high-pressure turnaround environment, visibility and alignment are everything. The Cleopatra–Aurora integration provides both.

• For Planners: Assurance that their detailed work packages drive execution directly.
• For Schedulers: Tools to optimize dynamically while staying true to scope and constraints.
• For Field Supervisors: Up-to-date schedules that reflect real-world progress.
• For Executives: A strategic view of performance, risks, and costs in real time.

This alignment ensures decisions are made quickly, confidently, and collaboratively.

Transforming Turnaround Outcomes

With Cleopatra and Aurora working together, organizations are equipped to deliver turnarounds on time and on budget—with far greater confidence and predictability.

Benefits at a glance:
• reduced risk through integrated planning and execution
• greater productivity by optimizing resources and minimizing downtime
• enhanced predictability with probabilistic forecasts and real-time adjustments
• transparency and accountability via a single, integrated source of truth

In short, this solution doesn’t just improve turnaround management—it redefines it.

The Future of Turnaround Management

As industries face increasing pressure to minimize downtime and deliver under tighter constraints, the need for smarter, integrated turnaround management has never been greater. By uniting Aurora’s intelligent scheduling with Cleopatra’s robust planning—enhanced by sensitivity analysis and Monte Carlo simulation—organizations gain a next-generation toolkit to manage uncertainty, optimize outcomes, and deliver with confidence. The future of turnaround management is integrated, intelligent, and adaptive—and with Cleopatra and Aurora, that future is here today.