According to Jimmy Jernigan, associate director of global maintenance and reliability for LyondellBasell, his teams have adopted a strategy that "drives the reliability of our assets toward targeted levels to align with our business."
This strategy includes optimizing maintenance costs, he said, "so our approach to digital has been a focused one where we're trying to be specific about solving some issues, the opportunities we have and using digital to help us do that."
Further, Jernigan said, "we've made some good headway in that area" by employing this approach to maintenance productivity for the past couple of years.
Bill Holladay, liquefaction maintenance superintendent for Freeport LNG, a world-scale LNG project, said that around that same time, his teams started commissioning their first training and finished their third training in 2020.
"I came in during the construction phase, through commissioning and startup, and now we have a little over a year of run time, so we're getting past that 'infantile plant startup' phase," Holladay said. "We're setting up our data and equipment monitoring to really dial in our preventive maintenance strategy for equipment availability."
More uptime, Holladay reasoned, leads to more production, which ultimately leads to more money that can be allocated to the facility.
"That's where it's critical to us," he said.
Holladay said that as technology advances, his groups at Freeport LNG have more data than they've ever had before.
"But the cybersecurity component of that is a very front-and-center concern," he said.
Walter Pesenti, global operational excellence manager at INEOS, said the frequency of changing the metrics for the risk levels his group is using on individual equipment depends on the condition of the equipment being changed.
"If you operate the equipment in the same conditions and don't see abnormalities, we don't see the need for changing the metrics for that equipment," he said. "It also depends on how you look at the metrics.
We have the metrics for availability." Pesenti said they consider the best rate achieved over seven days and then use that as a benchmark.
"Then we look at any other factor that leads us to [determine if] it has an impact on reliability or availability," he said.
Pesenti explained that when using the term "reliability" here, it is important to determine if something that was not predicted is causing the failure, or if it is something you've already planned for.
"You adjust based on that," Pesenti said. "If conditions change year after year, you may create conditions that are not normally seen in that piece of equipment. Then you have to adjust how you do the maintenance strategy for that piece of equipment and how it is going to behave. So, you align the metrics with that."
What's working
In an industry where so many things can go wrong, Jernigan highlighted some maintenance and reliability factors that are working well at LyondellBasell.
"We've been using technology to try to help improve our maintenance efficiency," he said. "We're getting the technology into the hands of our supervisors, crafts and contractors who are using it to help remove the barriers preventing them from being productive."
"We're collecting delays, so we have the information from our operations group on equipment readiness that first thing in the morning for the equipment that's supposed to be ready at night."
The focus to digitize LyondellBasell's maintenance process enables Jernigan's teams to better track and understand how things are working in the field and use that data "to help us understand if it's a materials or permitting issue or identify where else our delays are coming from so we can move forward."
Jernigan said improvements have occurred across LyondellBasell's sites.
"We're working to implement further technology to help us do some productivity studies in real time, and collect that data from all of our sites in the U.S. and Europe into the future," he said. "That'll allow us to really drill down and use that data to continue to improve. We're also expanding it to our inspection process, and will expand it next into the planning areas."
"We've had really good success so far," Jernigan concluded. "It's a start."
