Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS) Malaysia’s fully integrated oil and gas multinational company accurately identified 51 major early warnings, creating a value of RM73.1M, equivalent to savings of US$17.4M, and 14x ROI via AVEVA’s asset performance management (APM) solutions.
All industrial organizations that operate machinery naturally need to factor in maintenance strategies and activities to ensure all equipment operates smoothly in order to avoid unplanned downtime, which can result in an entire plant shutdown and lead to catastrophic consequences. As the world’s leading energy producer, PETRONAS recognized that having the insight of impending equipment failure via an APM solution would enable the plant operators to proactively respond to issues and fix the equipment before bigger problems ensued.
“Predictive analytics make organizations more efficient and resilient by transforming them from being reactive to being proactive. Organizations can implement asset strategies designed to avoid unplanned downtime for their most critical assets, and also work out corrective or preventative strategies for the less vital equipment.
“This, in turn, allows industrial organizations to better optimize capital and operational expenditures while realizing financial savings by avoiding productivity losses or wasted man-hours. Predictive analytics empowers industrial organizations to be more proactive in their work,” says Boris Marrone, Vice President Sales, Asia Pacific and Head of South Asia & South East Asia, AVEVA.
Early problem detection
Following a successful POC to evaluate AI-infused AVEVA Predictive Analytics, PETRONAS implemented a pilot project in their corporate cloud running on Microsoft Azure, at four upstream platforms and at two downstream plants.
“Our digital transformation strategy at PETRONAS is to add value quickly, as this has a faster impact on our sustainability goals and on profitability. We do this by identifying discrete projects with tangible deliverables and then cascading the same approach elsewhere, having learned valuable lessons along the way. AVEVA Predictive Analytics allowed our teams to adopt a templated approach that enabled us to quickly deploy the solution in other sites, ensuring high time to value and fast ROI.” Mohd Nazrin Zaini, Senior Engineer (Rotating Equipment), PETRONAS
New ways of working
The maintenance and reliability engineers at PETRONAS use AVEVA Predictive Analytics for their day-to-day tasks, to monitor assets across the sites. All levels have visibility of the systems, from technicians to plant managers as well as management teams. With these capabilities in the cloud, PETRONAS can remove silos and build new and more collaborative ways of working. In elevating digital fluency to its people, PETRONAS expects these successful pilot programs to spread the word in their digitalization journey. The approach is not about convincing employees, but rather immersing them in new ways of working through digital solutions.
RM73.1M Savings
The pilot implementation accurately predicted failures in advance that enabled PETRONAS’ team to fix issues ahead of actual failures. In 2020 (the first year of deployment) with 200 models deployed, the solution accurately identified 51 major early warnings, creating a value of RM73.1M, equivalent to savings of US$17.4M, and 14x ROI. Out of the 51 warnings, 12 were identified as high-impact warnings. Resolving these ahead of actual failure has reduced unscheduled downtime that has saved PETRONAS millions of dollars.
Many of the catches helped to reduce critical rotating equipment failure and downtime and have led to improved reliability through proactive asset monitoring and maintenance. For example, an instrumentation fault was identified leading to a catch in a liquid separator that saved PETRONAS $222K (RM934K) in potential asset failure and wasted material. A potential motor failure was also caught when AVEVA Predictive Analytics identified increases in the motors lube oil temperature, the winding temperature and the hot air temperature, saving $82K (RM344K) in equipment replacement. In another situation, a mechanical fault was identified allowing maintenance engineers to pinpoint a water supply temperature out of specification along with an increase in bearing temperature. Catching this issue before it cascaded into a major equipment failure saved Petronas $48K (RM 202K).
Reduced maintenance costs, a safer plant and improved equipment utilization
Part of the value creation at PETRONAS comes from cutting maintenance costs. Using the AVEVA APM solution on their Azure cloud platform enabled the team to streamline day-to-day operations and regular maintenance cycles. They can analyze the problems in detail and take further proactive action to reduce the chance of reoccurrence, which further contributed to the reduced maintenance costs. Avoidance of equipment failures and unplanned shutdowns has also contributed to better safety records and a safer working environment.
What’s next?
Following the successful pilot across four plants, PETRONAS has deployed AVEVA Predictive Analytics at an additional 10 plants with a total of 150 equipment trains. PETRONAS aims to continue rolling out the APM solution in the cloud to all its assets to enjoy similar results across the business. PETRONAS also uses a cloud-based AVEVA Unified Supply Chain to optimize its entire supply and distribution network, cutting crude evaluation time and reducing margins.
“The PETRONAS Machinery Monitoring and Prescriptive Diagnostics (P-MMPD) system – based on AVEVA’s advanced analytic tools that utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) – will be scaled up across our business. We, therefore, expect the value delivered to PETRONAS from our AVEVA solution to increase accordingly, as we continue to collaborate with our technology partners to support our Moving Forward Together strategy.”
