Challenges of large-scale production
Prior to the project, the petrochemical company SIBUR maintained largely decentralized norms and equipment databases at its numerous production facilities. This means that each production facility worked with its own body of data. Having accumulated a large amount of fragmented information, the company found its ability to analyze business data in a centralized manner considerably limited.
Given that any production enterprise attempts to maintain its fixed assets while making effective use of its budget funds and given that high-quality data become an important business asset in the conditions of digital economy, the SIBUR top executives decided to not only put together a body of data required to launch a maintenance and repairs module, but also to fully update and standardize the corporate norms and equipment databases at all the production facilities involved in the system’s rollout.
In 2017, the project was implemented at five production facilities simultaneously. The norms and equipment databases at the “SIBUR-TyumenGaz”, “SIBUR-Kstovo” and “SIBUR Neftekhim” production facilities were prepared for migration and were successfully transferred at the end of 2017. A primary equipment database was put together at “POLIEF”, while at “ZapSibNeftekhim” whose construction is underway, the project specialists helped collect construction and passport documentation required to put together relevant databases.
Optimal solution
The Russian company IBS was enlisted to help put together requisite norms and equipment databases. The company was chosen primarily due to the comprehensive nature of the services it provides, e.g.:
- IBS has its own tools required to automate the handling of large amounts of information (IBS Passportization) and, as a consequence, the company is able to process any amount of data in the course of automated audits;
- IBS offered to lower the cost of work by training SIBUR specialists and subsequently involving them in the project implementation process;
- IBS uses a systemic approach and is especially thorough when it comes to data verification – this made it possible to identify a larger number of typical errors as compared to the traditional approaches of its competition.
“Special attention should be paid to the quality of data when preparing them for migration. Our team’s multiyear experience in this field and its ability to understand the specificity and structure of production equipment data enabled us to offer analyzing and verifying SIBUR data in terms of a considerably larger number of options compared to our competition, as well as to identify a much larger number of typical errors and potentially problematic situations. In addition, under this project, we designed a data verification method that the client can use independently”, – says Ilya Kulakov, Head of the IBS Production Management Division.
Databases are already in operation
This phase of the project took a little over a year to complete. In February 2017, IBS specialists began the gradual processing and standardization of the data they had collected.
By now, the main goal has been achieved – the specialists of the “SIBUR-TyumenGaz”, “SIBUR-Kstovo” and “SIBUR Neftekhim” production facilities are making a full use of the possibilities afforded by the TOPO module: they generate event messages and put together equipment maintenance and repair orders; they document МТР applications and plan resources for the next service cycle. All these data are collected for the purposes of statistics and they will be subsequently used to improve the equipment reliability management processes and make equipment maintenance and repairs more effective and efficient.
Project phase in numbers
- More than 250 thousand units worth of equipment databases formed.
- More than 190 thousand units of equipment accounted for by repair norms.
- More than 46 thousand orders (for technical maintenance and repairs) generated within the system in 2019 based on the TOPO plans.
Rodion Vorotnikov, the SIBUR manager responsible for planning and development of fixed assets, notes: “In order for us to be able to plan and control the budget within the ERP system effectively we needed to identify specific methodological approaches and introduce procedures designed to manage the quality of equipment maintenance and repair reference data – the original materials used to put together databases. Once we created the methodological basis and resources, there came up the problem of technical implementation: consolidation of equipment data of the production facilities involved in the project, assurance of mass verification and processing of these data, and preparation of templates required for migration to the ERP system. Having considered all pros and cons, we delegated this job to an external partner. The IBS team was able to optimize data collection and processing thereby often saving time for our production specialists involved in the data collection procedures, as well as to meet rather tight deadlines established by the ERP system deployment team. On a separate note, we created conditions under which IBS project experts were able to train our internal specialists and prepare them for subsequent work with reference data. This gives us a certain amount of latitude and helps us save corporate funds”.