Description of the Site: The Beaumont refinery represents a major portion of the Gulf coast refining capacity, with Beaumont processing 400,000 bbls/day.

Nature of the Opportunity: Mobil leadership had been considering and working with another consulting firm to identify the next step in their reliability efforts, specifically tying reliability to costs and benefits. They coined the term, "Business-Driven Reliability" to identify the objectives they sought.

Beaumont refinery leadership contacted SAMI based on a article published in Maintenance Technology entitled, Creating a Strategic Plan for Asset Management. We were told that the readership of this article in Mobil was extensive, and extended high into the ranks of management.

What We Did: We coordinated a visit and participated in the initial presentation of The Manufacturing Game ®. Later we discussed SAMI's philosophy and capabilities, and decided the place to start was with an Assessment.

Based on the Assessment, we proceeded with a design phase that combined SAMI's ideas regarding Asset Management, and Mobil's ideas on "Business-Driven Reliability". The design lead to a number of new core processes:

• Creating new Asset Care tasks for all production equipment
• Identifying equipment condition and taking immediate action for degraded equipment
• Developing a new planning process at the plant level, production unit level and for maintenance. This was a truly proactive approach, and created project targets for improvements in reliability and maintainability for the following year, based on the specific performance required to meet the business plan for the refinery
• Providing improved measurement and documentation of change and reliability practices and structure
• Coordinating all communications within the production organization, moving them to a future orientation, rather than just the immediate problem

We helped Beaumont pilot and implement these designs, and create an implementation organization capable of continuing to operate in this manner.

Results: More than $20 million of production improvements were implemented early in this process. Defining and implementing improvements became a part of the local culture. In fact we received excellent support by the unions involved, because it added to the value that each hourly worker added to the company.