Global Refining Organization
Implementing Asset Performance Management (APM) programs across large, multisite organizations requires careful consideration of business process impacts, integration of key enterprise systems, and focus on enabling resources to succeed in the goal of increased availability, optimized maintenance activities, and lower risks to safety and the environment. Too often, large enterprise APM projects get lost in the technical steps associated with ‘big bang’ enterprise rollouts and lose sight of the key goal, which is ensuring the reliability and maintenance teams are efficiently enabled to impact equipment reliability positively. The reality with successful Asset Performance Management programs is they are much more than technical projects with a specific set of tasks and a defined endpoint; they are business process shifts that live in perpetuity and must be treated as ever-evolving and agile activities that focus on the development, implementation, and ongoing management of Asset Strategies to optimize performance. For this reason, many companies reboot their asset performance management programs.
Itus Digital recently worked with a major oil & gas downstream producer to deliver an APM solution across multiple refining operations. This customer previously implemented an APM program which was a “technical success” but languished for several years after the initial project completion. The customer recognized the untapped potential that was achievable if they could reboot their program, focus on functional adoption, and ensure the implementation of Asset Strategies.
One of the primary tenets of the re-focused initiative was to engage with the right partners who could bring the best level of APM expertise to the initiative. Itus Digital was chosen as one of those partners because of our extensive functional and technical experience in APM. Itus Digital provided services to enable the core APM processes of Asset Strategy and Asset Health management. Functionally, Itus provided subject matter expertise to define, train and coach the customer on reliability/production metrics, risk assessment techniques, strategy implementation, and activating equipment health management processes. The functional implementation process included core APM steps of:
- Identifying Critical Assets through risk assessment techniques
- Defining Reliability and Production Metrics for Bad Actor Identification
- Defining and Optimizing Asset Strategies
- Analyzing Asset Health Data for appropriate remediation
Standard practices were implemented to accelerate time to value, including the facilitation of corporate asset strategy templates for site rollout with a process to address high, medium, and low critical assets.
In parallel, Itus Digital technically delivered upon an APM scope which included the integration of SAP for transactional work order information and OSI-PI for near real-time condition assessment, bringing together IT and OT information for APM. This was accomplished through various upgrades of systems, which required coordination of system providers for the integration milestones to be achieved.
With milestones successfully achieved at initial sites, the customer is moving forward with the corporate rollout to all sites, which is currently underway with our support. With the rebooted APM program focused on the functional implementation of Asset Strategies and engagement of Maintenance and Reliability resources, the customer is now starting to realize the benefits projected in the initial justification of the enterprise APM program rollout.