IBM’s new ‘Pulse’ conference was held last month for its combined Tivoli and Maximo customer base. A session on Maximo in oil and gas brought together users from clients including ADCO, Petroci, OMV, BP, Shell and Repsol. IBM’s Terry Ray explained the need for maintenance repair and operations in oil and gas quoting a report from the UK regulator which stated ‘More than half of the oil and gas industry’s assets in the North Sea that have been inspected over the last three years are in poor condition, and companies will face closure or prosecution if they do not improve safety standards. Safety related incidents had occurred because of the poor upkeep of basic structures and some maintenance backlogs were unacceptable.’ The ‘KP3’ report noted that ‘senior managers are not making adequate use of integrity management data and are not giving ongoing maintenance sufficient priority.’ A new theme for Maximo is the digital oilfield, described as a ‘step change in available data and visualization techniques.’ Reference was also made to IBM’s Integrated Information Framework (IIF) and its smorgasbord of supported standards.
Lifecycle management
Ed Popko’s paper demonstrated the benefits of integrating maintenance data with product lifecycle management (PLM). This provides manufacturers and owner/operators with a shared view of key information and automated processes such as repair vs. replace decision support, alternate parts and disposal and handling procedures. A demo showed the combined use of Matrix One (Dassault) and Maximo to analyze a faulty pump on an oil platform. A websphere-based integration automatically notifies engineering that there is a recurring problem with specific asset types, helping to reduce warranty costs and improve product support. These techniques are being field tested by both Halliburton and Schlumberger.
BP Anadarko
Paul Millburg (BP) described Maximo’s work management functionality as fitting BP’s safety and operational integrity goal of ‘never another Texas City.’ BP has 38 instances of Maximo worldwide ‘directly affecting’ some 10,000 staff. These customized systems are proving expensive to maintain and upgrade and BP is looking to consolidate its operations and maintenance activities at the enterprise level with a global work management solution using the latest Maximo technology. A multidisciplinary team built a work management template and toolkit and BP has been working with IBM to influence the development of the Maximo tool and the oil and gas solution. Both template and toolkit have been tested in a pilot at BP’s Anadarko basin unit. The results were very positive—with zero incidents (due to increased visibility of work) a $220,000 annual OPEX saving, a 20% decrease in unscheduled activity and a ten fold increase in documented work. For BP, ‘Maximo is a way of life.’ The 38 instances in E&P today will be consolidated to five and moved to one global Maximo standard.
Turnaround tracking
Mike Sims (Placid refining) described turnaround tracking in Maximo. Turnaround involves the shutdown of a plant or section of a plant for the purpose of inspection or upgrade. The aim is to achieve as much work as possible in a tight time window to minimize lost production. Turnaround challenges include managing a large number of outside contractors and temporary labor, making effective use of equipment, unplanned work and managing a large amount of materials that are needed in a short time frame. A significant data collection and organization effort is a prerequisite and data needs to be kept up-to-date in real time. Training is critical—but ‘elegant solutions are only as good as the people using them.’ Maximo partner Electronic Data Inc. was integrator for the project.
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