BP is one of the world’s largest energy companies and is driving a companywide digital initiative to deliver operational efficiencies across its business. It was identified that one of the key business areas primed for standardisation is Turnarounds (TAR).
Challenge
BP is one of the world’s largest energy companies and is driving a companywide digital initiative to deliver operational efficiencies across its business.
It was identified that one of the key business areas primed for standardisation is Turnarounds (TAR) – the critical exercise that needs to be completed quickly and efficiently to minimise the cost and disruption caused by shutting down operations. By integrating applications, standardising and aligning business processes and tools for TAR, BP would have iterative and repeatable processes across its refineries to:
- Enable a reusable, scalable integration approach to deliver real-time value and benefits across global assets, teams, business areas and sites
- Strengthen the integrity, reliability and availability of essential business information
- Change the way they work, where digital execution becomes business execution
- Allow for a substantial time, financial and team efficiencies across their entire downstream refining value chain
Objective
Driving Shutdown/Turnaround Efficiencies Across 8 Refineries Through Integration
To improve turnaround times and data management BP wanted to integrate business-critical systems across their global operations. This would minimise inefficiencies such as:
- Reliance on spreadsheets and manual data entry
- Possibility of incorrect orders, scheduling, and financial inputs
- The omission of key processes
With an understanding that BP would benefit from having business-critical information automatically integrated with TAR planning and scoping tools to enable better management of critical turnaround activities, an initiative was kicked off with the following key objectives:
- Bring digital execution to the forefront of the business with speed to delivery and outcomes
- Eliminate manual workflows, reliance on spreadsheets and align and automate data sources and flows
- Plan and execute a turnaround prototype at one site to then leverage across 8 sites globally- reducing turnaround cost, disruption and duration across the business
- Leverage” fit for purpose” technologies and applications for scoping and planning TARs with MuleSoft to seamlessly integrate processes and take advantage of data from systems such as SAP enterprise resource planning systems (procurement), IBM Maximo maintenance management systems and Oracle Primavera scheduling systems.
Solution
Working with BP’s TAR planners, operators, Superintendents, technical system administrators and business teams, we aligned the operational and TAR related business processes to create a solution leveraging the data in the system of record to control any data in relevant sub-systems.
We tested the centralised data and integrated it with business processes (eliminating the reliance on spreadsheets) and also standardised on MuleSoft – an integration software platform – to power the exercise.
The work entailed integrating a TAR planning and scoping tool with business-critical systems - SAP, IBM Maximo and Oracle Primavera - to create a seamless data architecture to support turnaround activities. Leveraging API-led design and architecture meant the prototype site could be rolled out and validated before integrating these solutions across the eight global locations - identifying gaps in sites and systems and bringing standardization to lift and shift the work done at the prototype site and quickly deliver value to the other sites.
“Across these 8 sites, their data sources may be modelled just a little bit differently, but we don’t have to get to every site to understand their data mapping before we are able to deliver our first piece of value. As we extend to sites, we just re-configure our application through CICD principles and roll out that way. This makes life easy for BP and lets us deliver outcomes very quickly.”
The initial engagement only required Denver to interface master data – including inventory holdings and functional locations, such as where equipment is required in a plant, where the equipment is located and what type of equipment is required – from one place to another. However, as results were delivered, BP increased the scope of the project to other data sources, including transactional data. In addition, there is now a bi-directional data flow between the scoping and planning tool and the other business systems.
Results
Getting to Value Instantly
Denver’s domain knowledge of the energy industry, its technical skills in both the platform (MuleSoft) and the underlying source and target systems, as well as the use of Agile methodology to deliver the work in two-week sprints gives BP rapid value. The success so far has seen BP give the go-ahead for Denver to expand the integrations further to project portfolio systems - Nostra for capital project performance and EcoSys – used for capital project management forecasting.
“We help determine whether data should be integrated in the format it is in, or whether the data needs to be cleaned first. If you perform integrations against all the data scenarios in the source system, you end up coding for a lot of scenarios you simply don’t need to code for. We can look at the source system, identify what needs to be cleaned and help perform the cleanup a lot quicker than if BP tried to do so themselves.” Greg Pattinson, Solution Architect, Denver
Delivering on Executable Transformation
Key to program success is the ability to work closely with multiple teams within the client, with support across the globe in multiple time zones. “We apply a ‘follow the sun’ model and embed ourselves within the client to deliver the highest quality outcomes for turnaround integration,” says Simon Charewicz, Head of Digital Execution, Denver.
“We proved we could deliver in this realm, and that gave BP the confidence to scale the activity scope- we now offer turnaround integration as a product, that can be scaled across all refineries to support their activities. Because this work was delivered as a DevOps service, anything we build we support. So part of what we are doing as we build out the integration landscape is provide the APIs to different teams and divisions within BP so they can reuse them to solve their own business problems.”
With a fully integrated, best-of-breed solution set, BP is moving away from spreadsheets and is ideally positioned to execute turnarounds with optimum efficiency, with access to accurate, timely data and clear systems and processes across their value chain.