Refinery Tank Maintenance
This integrated operator was experiencing increasing tank maintenance costs, decreasing tank availability and growing lost profit opportunity. To help reverse these trends, RLG was asked to implement Tank Excellence (TANKx™) at one refinery, and then across all the operator’s North American refineries.
“RLG has helped us coordinate and integrate the efforts between multiple organizations with competing priorities. They have helped us develop strategic plans which have directly contributed to significant reductions in refinery wide LPO.”
— Refinery Maintenance Manager
Context/Challenge
This major refinery struggled with inflated cost and lost profit opportunity (LPO) due to gaps in the process and execution of their tank maintenance program. With each project, they failed to achieve project cost and schedule performance targets. Their mandate was to:
- Eliminate Backlog: Strategically eliminate their out of service tank backlog,
- Minimize Constraints: More tanks in service, flexibility in product storage and blending,
- Curtail Financial Losses: Limit LPO by improving predictability in tank out of service, return to service dates and operating plans.
Approach
RLG’s team worked closely with those designing, planning and executing the Tank Maintenance program. For this, the RLG team leveraged RLG’s Tank Excellence (TANKx) approach. TANKx’s builds internal capability and a systematic approach for improving planning, processes, alignment and execution within the tank maintenance team. Our approach was to:
- Assess Current Practices: Review current practices and identify changes to strengthen processes and change behaviours,
- Build a Repeatable Good Practice: Through strategic and tactical maintenance plans, governance and stewardship guidelines, and long-range planning processes,
- Embed a Systematic Approach: Design stage gate planning processes, work with local teams and the parent organization to embed a project management structure and system,
- Improve Front Line Productivity: Worked with contractor teams to understand and mitigate interferences to higher wrench time.
Result
This client engagement achieved its objectives, first at one refinery, then scaled across all this client’s refineries. The results at the first refinery included:
- Cut LPO by $40 million/4 years versus historical performance,
- Reduced average Tank Maintenance cost by 12%, amounting to $5 million annually,
- Decreased idle out-of-service tanks by 33%, with a plan to be at zero within 5 years.
- Controlled and reduced post-freeze scope growth by 75%,
- Developed and implemented a repeatable, reliable, and consistent project management process for each tank and the overall tank maintenance program.
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