Miguel Sison, senior reliability engineer at Chevron.
In order to make the best use of maintenance dollars, leaders at Chevron recognized a need to introduce a software tool that integrates asset performance, maintenance and cost data into an interactive dashboard that helps users identify opportunities to optimize preventative and predictive maintenance task frequencies and scope.
"What we needed was a tool that would tell us we were doing the right thing," said Miguel Sison, senior reliability engineer at Chevron, discussing strategies for using data analytics to optimize preventative maintenance activities at the AFPM Reliability & Maintenance Conference and Exhibition held recently in Grapevine, Texas.
Sison said one of many business intelligence (BI) software platforms in the market is Microsoft's Power BI solution. "It's another platform that can do all that and more," he said.
Sison explained Chevron considered a number of features before choosing its analytics software.
"One of the things we considered in choosing our BI solution was, of course, company-wide availability," he said.
"Initially, we just wanted to reach the people in the refinery, but it turns out, with this tool, we can reach not only the other refineries but also our downstream manufacturing."
BI software provides everyone in the company with the ability to view a report -- "even in upstream, if you want that to be the case," Sison said.
Bye-bye, IT guy
Sison also lauded these platforms' ease in sharing dashboards and reports.
"This is built into the BI platform," he said. "All it takes to share your report is to email a link. And what happens is it not only opens up the report; it opens all the BI services, so you have a full-blown program that runs on Internet Explorer, and you are able to view or manipulate the report the way you see fit."
The platform also has the ability to perform the various data science project steps in one solution, including data extraction, cleaning and enrichment; model building; visualization; and machine learning capabilities.
"Data uploads into the cloud," Sison continued. "And from there, the program can extract that data. You can refresh it anytime. And if that data is also live, you are able to refresh it."
Sison also said he appreciates this emerging BI software's simplicity and user-friendliness.
"You can still use your [past spreadsheets], so if you already have some that you have built before and you need to use that data, you can still use that same report that uses data from the cloud," he said.
Beyond graphs and bar charts, the platform supports visuals that perform interactive and layered functions.
"With layered charting, you can use one chart as a filter for another chart," Sison said. "This is the kind of visualization that is now possible with this software."
It also makes "self-service BI" possible, Sison said. "Before, whenever you wanted to make a report for wider consumption, not just personal consumption, you had to contact an IT guy. You always needed somebody that was able to program," he said. "So this is something that, for me, is really revolutionary. You don't have to get in touch with an IT guy who knows how to program the report but doesn't necessarily know how the business works. Now ⦠you know the data, you know what it can do, so you can go ahead and put them all together."
Ultimately, all of the dashboards and reports in this new software are interactive.
"Some people may need to see the report in a different way or for a different purpose," Sison concluded. "So the more interactive it is, the better it serves more people's needs."
