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Other case studies:
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case study: Oil
Refining
An Oil Refining company thought that it was solving a process
problem when it let a contract to manage chemical injection in its
multiple process lines. The chemical company would take on responsibility
for inventory, re-ordering, dosing at the correct rates and cost
control.
The chemicals company thought that it had stolen a march on the
competition in that now it was sole supplier, and of course wasn’t
going to supply it’s competitors products. It would be paid
in accordance with the production rates.
However, the contract turned out to be a poisoned chalice. The
refinery wasn’t able to give accurate production details to
the chemicals supplier. Not the refinery’s fault because the
multi stage process was actually limited by the rate of production
of a by product, and that varied, not only with the raw material
entering the process but also in line with flow rates and pressures.
Masses of process data were kept, b the engineers, in order to support
decisions to manage the efficiency of the plant, but this didn’t
mean anything to the chemical company. It could only manage dosing
in accordance with the production forecasts and these didn’t
reflect the actual production rates. As a result the dosing rates
were kept at a constant rate, sometimes they were too high incurring
additional cost and others they were too low, risking corrosion
in the process plant.
At the end of each month the chemical company billed for the amount
of product injected but the refinery accountants wouldn’t
pay the bills. They wanted to pay in accordance with the amount
of product they generated and the only way they could determine
that was adding up the invoices for sales. The two businesses were
in a constant state of conflict over payments.
The chemicals company decided that the only way to solve the billing
problem was to get it’s own details of production rates in
order to support it’s invoices. Engineers were assigned to
work on the process data, using this to calculate the actual production
rates and to create a monthly performance report, involving multiple
data sources and thousands of calculations. As a result the company
was better able to support it’s billing, relating it to actual
flows, but the report took eight man-days each month to build, and
of course the problem of over and under dosing continued. They were
still working on production forecasts.
The chemical company asked C3, suppliers of the APM analytics software
suite, to propose a solution to their problem. Within three months
a system had been installed and was in daily use, taking on line
measurements as production took place and supporting “real
time” decisions about dosing requirements. The report that
had previously taken eight man-days to produce took only 17 seconds
and can be available at any time and distributed by email.
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