Maintenance Process & Reliability Improvement

Oil Refinery

Our client was a large (437,000 barrels per day) Texas Coast refinery providing gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil, feed stock for the plastic industry, and a variety of light and heavy end products.
Both the Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) and maintenance work processes used at the facility were area and unit-based vs. a refinery-wide, common platform. Maintenance overtime was high and the productivity of company and contractor maintenance forces was low when compared to industry standards. Based on industry norms, equipment reliability was also low and seen as a major profitability issue.

The facility was under corporate pressure to increase profitability through reallocation or reduction of maintenance labor resources, as well as achieving throughput objectives.

Approach

MTG conducted an assessment which resulted in a proposed improvement plan that was agreed to by company management. An internal cross-functional team was created to design and roll out an appropriate, facilitywide maintenance process, and to re-implement and train users on a uniform CMMS. Extensive field coaching was provided to both operations and maintenance personnel to introduce the new concepts and ingrain the behavioral changes required to sustain long-term improvement. Key achievements include:

A consistent, facilitywide maintenance process was developed and agreed to by all units for work identification, authorization, planning, scheduling, backlog management, and work execution. Area and refinery-wide review meetings were regularly held to monitor progress and eliminate barriers to improvement.
Specific roles and responsibilities associated with both the CMMS and the maintenance process were defined and communicated to all positions.
Key performance indicators were developed and implemented to provide monthly, weekly, and daily insight on resource utilization and equipment uptime.
Weekly look-ahead and daily coordination meetings between maintenance operations and engineering were implemented to increase participation and commitment to the scheduling and execution process.

Results

Maintenance Resource Improvements:

Utilization of company and contractor maintenance labor resources improved through a reallocation and/or reduction of 203 Full-Time Equivalents, resulting in an annual savings of $9 million to $10 million dollars per year.
Machine shop average turnaround time on pump overhauls decreased from a historic average of 29 days to less than six.
Preventive Maintenance compliance increased by more than 17 percent.

Up-time Improvements:

In the first six months after program completion, pump failures were reduced by 34 and compressor failures by 14 as compared to the previous six months
Mean Time Between Failure improved by 4.8 months for pumps and 7.2 months for compressors

Conclusion