Beyond just being a maintenance contractor, APTIM delivers reliability, resiliency and ESG services.
The APTIM team boasts decades of reliability and predictive maintenance expertise, paired with a commitment to continue developing data-driven technologies that support its customers and workers on the ground.
APTIM's asset maintenance and reliability engineering team offers an extensive portfolio of technology services, including reliability methodologies (RAM-RBD analysis, RCM-PMO, CMMS optimization, etc.), MRO stock optimization services (supply chain assessments, cataloging of materials, spares and tools, etc.), data analytics (asset management information systems deployment, etc.), condition-based monitoring and its new R²AM model (reliability, resiliency, availability and maintainability).
The following projects are just a few examples where APTIM's asset maintenance and reliability engineering portfolio helped customers improve availability, safety and production.
APTIM's full reliability portfolio improved availability by 5 percent for a major gas and LNG fractionation operation containing 45,000-plus assets.
A company with upstream, midstream and downstream operations needed help performing reliability-centered maintenance (as part of a multi-year project for improvements in asset management and production) at two of their facilities: a gas plant producing 90,000 bpd of NGL and 1,200 million standard cubic feet per day of dry gas (responsible for generating 40 percent of the power in the area), as well as an NGL fractionation plant producing various amounts of propane, butane, diesel and naphtha.
With both locations having been in operation for more than 15 years, it was believed the maintenance programs were running efficiently. However, this was not the case and the company soon realized many improvements were necessary to meet the requirements of their long-term project. With more than 45,000 assets combined at both sites, the challenge was finding a maintenance partner who could assist with such a large undertaking.
After being selected as the ideal candidate for work, APTIM was able to provide most of its portfolio for reliability engineering and maintenance services, including taxonomy updates (in accordance with ISO 14224), equipment criticality analysis and updates, RCM-based analysis for the creation of preventive and condition-based maintenance for critical assets at both plants, optimization of both spare parts and quantities for maintenance work, updates to technical information of assets in the CMMS, and support for uploading information to the CMMS (SAP-PM).
Using a team of 21 employees over a span of 18 months, APTIM successfully:
- Increased the company's operational availability (from 93 percent to 98 percent).
- Decreased corrective activities by 13 percent.
- Reduced man-hours by 20 percent (compared to the previous strategy).
- Optimized maintenance inventories valued at $7 million.
- Improved technical and hierarchical information of assets in SAP-PM to meet ISO 14224 requirements and avoid repetition of work orders.
These efforts helped the sites find relevant technical data of critical equipment much faster, so the workforce could spend more time in the field and focus on what really matters in terms of safety, production and operational costs.
APTIM's RAM simulation and RCM strategy prepped a new ethane recovery unit, creating a 99-percent uptime and 50-percent maintenance savings over 10 years.
An LNG facility recently hired APTIM to build a new ethane recovery unit as part of its operation. This resulted in the facility's need to then hire an experienced partner who could assist with production analyses, a 10-year operational forecast (weighing costs and risks) that considered all possible unit failures and the probability of events from four different modeling scenarios, as well as a strategy for reliability- centered maintenance.
APTIM's experienced team, advanced modeling tools, and large database for maintenance techniques and best practices made it a great fit for the job and allowed the company to continue its relationship with the LNG site.
Through RAM modeling and analysis, APTIM developed a scenario where the ethane recovery unit would have an uptime of more than 99 percent, while the cost savings in maintenance (spare parts and labor) would be up by 50 percent over the 10-year period compared to the base manufacturer's strategy.
APTIM's RAM analysis determined a 67-percent gain in production and a stable 7 percent in cost from added compressors.
A company with several small offshore platforms has an inland facility that both compresses gas for sale and reinjects part of the gas into wells for gas lifting. Historically, the compressor on-site had poor reliability, and the company was now looking to increase the number of units available. However, most of the maintenance and production information for the existing compressor was either kept in notebooks or existed in "tribal" knowledge. Unable to achieve the desired production goals in their current state, the company sought to develop a strategy that would meet demands within the next five years, while maintaining a controlled budget and keeping profit loss to a minimum.
The company hired APTIM to run a RAM analysis that would project different combinations of equipment and strategies to find out which scenario would be the most cost-effective. APTIM had to analyze what data the facility did have and rely on the experience of the on-site team to identify prior maintenance issues that would help determine the operational philosophy for the compressors. Six different scenarios for the RAM analysis were developed, which included a baseline where the maintenance and operation would function as normal until two new compressors could be added as redundant, while an overhaul could take place on the other equipment.
Of all the scenarios that APTIM suggested to the client, it was determined the best solution would be to add a refurbished unit to the group, while the on-site team performed overhauls on the other compressors and complied with the actual maintenance strategy. With these changes to the operation, no new engineering would be required, and production would increase by 67 percent (compared to the original operation). It also meant the company would meet its five-year production goals, while keeping costs of the new units, overhauls and running maintenance at 7 percent of the total production for the period.
For more information, visit www.aptim.com or call (833) 862-7846.
