By improving its operations, an oil refinery achieved almost US$6 million in savings

Background

Refining is one of three main components of the oil and gas industry. The most commonly made product from one barrel of crude oil is motor fuel. Once processed crude oil has a wide array of uses. Apart from being turned into transportation fuels, it is also a major feedstock in the petrochemical industry and the building block for plastics.

Our client owns and operates one of the largest and most complex hydrocarbon refineries in Australia. They were having issues tied to project delivery; projects were taking too long to deliver and cost too much. This consequently affected backlogs and quantity of projects undertaken and completed.

As such, we were brought in to help the client identify opportunities to increase the effectiveness and efficiency in planning and executing projects.

Project Approach

Following the results of our analysis, we worked together with the client on a 25-week programme that addressed the following focus areas:

1. Development of a projects department and third-party SLAs to establish reciprocal obligations and cement working relationships.
2. Management of the portfolio under the project department’s control, as well as project management of individual projects.
3. Clarifying ambiguity surrounding operational definitions and overhauled SOPs.
4. Defined project duration and project man hours invested.
5. Development and installation of an enhanced management control system (MCS) to control and manage variance at the point of inception.
6. Development of an integrated management information system to collect data and interpret it into meaningful information for use in the MCS.
7. Enhanced work scheduling and planning practices.
   

   “The real benefit of this project is that we can now see and manage our performance with a factual system and accurately generated data…”

   Project Manager

8. Enhanced culture of collaboration and customer focus.

Project Implementation

The teams involved in this programme were charged with the responsibility of ensuring the programme developed sustainable solutions that can deliver a $5.8 million improvement in the delivery of the project’s portfolio for that fiscal year.

The project analysed a total of 64 projects at various stages of delivery over a three-year period and developed a comprehensive data set of base information. The total value of this sample pool was in excess of $100 million. This baseline data was assessed against the findings of our analysis to determine the root cause.

From there, we developed solutions to address deficiencies in the areas of management control, information management, reporting, standardised processes, management behaviours, skills capability and accountability, visible performance systems, and scheduling and planning standards.

These solutions were developed and installed with the extensive collaboration of the client-side experts, and extensively supported during the implementation phase.

Results