Turnaround Manager
A turnaround manager owns all aspects of a major refinery or chemical plant shutdown and restart: scope development, planning, contractor selection, scheduling, and execution. At Gulf Coast facilities, turnaround managers hold budget authority that can range from $50 million to over $500 million for a single event. They are the highest value contact for vendors of scaffold, mechanical services, valve shops, inspection, and specialty contractors.
Related roles: Turnaround Director, Turnaround Coordinator, Maintenance Manager
Reliability Engineer
A reliability engineer monitors bad actor equipment, drives root cause failure analysis, and develops preventive and predictive maintenance strategies at refineries and chemical plants. In Gulf Coast industrial operations, reliability engineers are key technical specifiers for rotating equipment, condition monitoring systems, and reliability software. They typically report to a reliability manager or director and hold strong influence over vendor selection before procurement gets involved.
Related roles: Reliability Manager, Rotating Equipment Engineer, Mechanical Integrity Engineer
Mechanical Integrity Engineer
A mechanical integrity engineer develops and maintains inspection and integrity programs for pressure vessels, heat exchangers, piping, storage tanks, and relief systems using API codes and risk based inspection methodology. At Gulf Coast facilities, this role is a primary technical specifier for NDE services, inspection contractors, and mechanical integrity software. The role sits at the intersection of OSHA PSM compliance and operational reliability.
Related roles: Inspection Manager, Corrosion Engineer, Reliability Engineer
Pursuit Intelligence
Pursuit Intelligence is ExecGraph's decision chain mapping feature. It takes a company, facility, and pursuit category, such as control valves, rotating equipment, or turnaround services, and automatically surfaces every relevant decision maker in the organizational hierarchy, from the entry contact to the budget authority. A complete pursuit chart generates in under three minutes and identifies both confirmed contacts and role gaps that require enrichment.
Related roles: Turnaround Manager, Reliability Director, Procurement Manager
Warm Path Connection
A warm path connection is an introduction route between a vendor and a target contact based on shared career history, alumni networks, or organizational adjacencies. ExecGraph's warm path algorithm identifies the highest probability introduction path so vendors can reach senior decision makers through existing relationships rather than cold outreach. Warm path analysis considers prior employers, shared colleagues, and career trajectories across the Gulf Coast industrial talent pool.
Related roles: All decision maker roles
Procurement Manager
A procurement manager oversees purchasing of materials, equipment, and services at a Gulf Coast refinery or chemical plant. They manage buyer teams, approve larger purchase orders and contracts, and maintain approved vendor lists and master service agreements. Procurement managers are commercial decision makers and co deciders on supplier selection. They control which vendors enter technical evaluations and what contract terms apply.
Related roles: Category Manager, Contracts Manager, Buyer
Turnaround Coordinator
A turnaround coordinator supports the turnaround manager in planning, scheduling, and executing refinery or chemical plant shutdowns. They build work packs, coordinate contractor sequences, track daily progress against the Primavera P6 schedule, and manage scope growth documentation. Turnaround coordinators are high value contacts for specialty service vendors because they control which contractors receive work packages and how scope is allocated during the event.
Related roles: Turnaround Manager, Maintenance Planner, Turnaround Director
Maintenance Planner
A maintenance planner creates and manages work orders, job packages, and purchase requisitions for maintenance activities at Gulf Coast industrial facilities. Planners define the parts list and scope for each maintenance job and route work to craft supervisors and reliability teams. They are high influence contacts for MRO distributors and specialty maintenance vendors because they write the purchase requisitions that become purchase orders.
Related roles: Maintenance Manager, Turnaround Coordinator, Reliability Engineer
Plant Manager
A plant manager holds overall accountability for safety, environmental performance, reliability, production, and financial results at a Gulf Coast refinery or chemical complex. They are the final decision maker for major multi year contracts and strategic vendor relationships. Plant managers engage vendors only at the site level value proposition: margin improvement, risk reduction, and reliability uplift across the full facility. They are typically reached only after building credibility with engineering and operations leadership below them.
Related roles: Director of Reliability, Director of Maintenance, Director of Operations
Turnaround Services
Turnaround services encompass the full range of contractors and specialty vendors who execute work during a planned shutdown at a Gulf Coast refinery or chemical plant. Primary categories include scaffold erection and dismantling, mechanical contractors for equipment removal and reinstallation, valve shops, PSV repair and testing, NDT and inspection services, insulation, painting and coatings, crane and rigging, and chemical cleaning. A large Gulf Coast turnaround may involve hundreds of contractors and billions of dollars in contracted services over its lifecycle.
Related roles: Turnaround Manager, Turnaround Director, Contracts Manager
Frame Agreement
A frame agreement, also called a master service agreement or MSA, is a pre negotiated contract between a Gulf Coast operator and a vendor that establishes rates, terms, safety requirements, and scope parameters for an ongoing service relationship. Frame agreements eliminate the need for individual bid processes on routine work. Being on a frame agreement at a major Gulf Coast operator is a significant commercial milestone because it positions a vendor to receive work without competitive bidding on each individual job.
Related roles: Procurement Manager, Contracts Manager, Category Manager
Risk Based Inspection
Risk based inspection, or RBI, is a methodology for prioritizing inspection activities at Gulf Coast industrial facilities based on the probability and consequence of equipment failure. RBI programs use API 580 and API 581 standards to assign risk rankings to pressure vessels, piping circuits, and storage tanks, and then determine inspection intervals and methods accordingly. Mechanical integrity engineers and inspection managers use RBI outputs to plan turnaround inspection scope and allocate inspection resources.
Related roles: Mechanical Integrity Engineer, Inspection Manager, Corrosion Engineer
Corrosion Engineer
A corrosion engineer owns corrosion monitoring programs, damage mechanism reviews, and chemical injection inputs for assigned process units at a Gulf Coast refinery or chemical plant. Gulf Coast corrosion engineers deal with specific damage mechanisms including sulfidation, naphthenic acid corrosion, CUI in humid coastal environments, HF alkylation corrosion, and MIC in cooling systems. They are technical evaluators and recommenders for corrosion monitoring hardware, chemical inhibitor programs, and advanced NDE services.
Related roles: Mechanical Integrity Engineer, Chemical Injection Engineer, Inspection Manager
Process Safety Management
Process safety management, commonly called PSM, is the OSHA regulatory framework under 29 CFR 1910.119 that governs highly hazardous chemicals at Gulf Coast refineries and chemical plants. PSM compliance requires facilities to maintain process hazard analyses, manage change through a formal MOC process, conduct mechanical integrity inspections, and investigate incidents systematically. PSM managers, process safety engineers, and PSM coordinators are key contacts for vendors of PHA facilitation, safety instrumented systems, and PSM software.
Related roles: Process Safety Manager, Process Safety Engineer, HSE Manager
Non Destructive Testing
Non destructive testing, or NDT, encompasses inspection methods that evaluate equipment and piping without removing them from service or damaging them. Common NDT methods at Gulf Coast facilities include ultrasonic thickness testing, phased array UT, radiographic testing, magnetic particle inspection, dye penetrant testing, and advanced techniques like guided wave UT and drone inspection. NDT services are a major spend category during turnarounds and are managed by inspection managers and mechanical integrity engineers.
Related roles: Inspection Manager, Mechanical Integrity Engineer, Turnaround Manager
Cathodic Protection
Cathodic protection is an electrochemical technique used to prevent corrosion of buried pipelines, storage tank bottoms, and marine structures at Gulf Coast industrial facilities. Gulf Coast environments, with wet saline soils, tidal zones, and congested plant infrastructure, present specific cathodic protection challenges. Cathodic protection engineers design, monitor, and maintain impressed current and galvanic anode systems, and integrate CP data into RBI and mechanical integrity programs.
Related roles: Corrosion Engineer, Pipeline Integrity Engineer, Mechanical Integrity Engineer
Reliability Director
A reliability director owns site wide reliability strategy for all process units and utilities at a Gulf Coast refinery or chemical complex. They chair reliability councils, approve major reliability initiatives, and hold budget authority for reliability programs typically ranging from $500,000 to $5 million. Reliability directors are key decision makers for condition monitoring systems, reliability software, rotating equipment standardization, and MRO distribution programs. They are best reached through technical SMEs and existing site relationships, not cold outreach.
Related roles: Reliability Manager, Rotating Equipment Engineer, Plant Manager
Warm Path Algorithm
ExecGraph's warm path algorithm identifies introduction routes between a vendor's network and target contacts at Gulf Coast energy companies. The algorithm scores paths based on shared career history, alumni networks, and organizational adjacencies, assigning quality labels from strong to weak based on the depth and recency of the connection. The goal is to surface the highest probability warm introduction before a vendor makes an outreach attempt.
Related roles: All senior decision maker roles
Gulf Coast Energy Markets
The Gulf Coast energy markets covered by ExecGraph span 13 industrial corridors across Texas and Louisiana: Houston Ship Channel, Corpus Christi, Beaumont, Port Arthur, Freeport and Bay City, Texas City and Galveston Bay, Victoria, and the Golden Triangle in Texas; and Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and surrounding Louisiana industrial corridors. These markets collectively represent the highest concentration of petroleum refining, petrochemical production, LNG terminal, and midstream infrastructure in North America.
Decision Chain
A decision chain is the sequence of contacts at a Gulf Coast energy facility who influence, specify, and approve a vendor purchase or contract. For a typical maintenance service contract, the decision chain may include a maintenance planner who defines the scope, a reliability engineer who specifies the vendor, a maintenance manager who approves the shortlist, a procurement manager who negotiates the contract, and a plant manager who signs off above a certain threshold. Understanding the full decision chain before outreach begins is the foundation of effective Gulf Coast industrial sales.
Related roles: Turnaround Manager, Procurement Manager, Plant Manager