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Dynamic Excellence In A Refinery-Based Company

Through a highly competitive federal procurement company award process, Dynamic Excellence in Information has deployed business automation and a document control system for a Refinery-Based Company.

This particular refinery-based company works in both Oil refinement and Chemical refinery operations. DEI was faced with the challenge of coming up with a unique solution to alleviate all document archiving, searchability, and ergonomic workflow improvements for a refinery-based company. The solution also had to be integration-friendly with both SAP and Oracle/IBM ERM software applications, and it had to enable a long measure of compliance standards on data and documentation, to ease the client’s frustrations with the ever-increasing EPA and other federal regulation increases.

An advanced capture product (PSI-Capture from PSIGEN) and a top-rated ECM/DMS system from Dynamic Excellence were selected to be the long-term partners of choice. DEI enabled advanced document management tools that could non-programmatically connect to both an SAP and Oracle ERM system, and document-enable any screen those SAP or Oracle users worked in the most. With just a single hot-key click, all users could retrieve documents for viewing, right out of their ERM systems, without even having the need to go through document management system training. Documents could also be scanned using the same hot-key functionality in a quick 2-click process.

Other significant requirements achieved were advanced database searching and linkages between documents from across departments from all over the refinery sites, web-scanning and secured access to documents remotely from laptop, PC, tablet, phone or other remote device, and content searching of all documents, even processed CAD design files so that engineers could find any document they need, by just searching on the most minute detail.

“This refinery location itself was operating 4 large multi-function peripherals that cost this company about $12,800.00 per month in lease, support and consumable supplies on a never-ending business lease too,…” noted Jeff Morton, a DEI project director, “We let them finance out our entire solution for just $4,170.00 per month on a limited term, and left just one of those old copier-printer-scanner MFP’s in place. So from day 1, they were about $4,900.00 more profitable, per month, just by buying our system and getting rid of 3 of those needless MFP devices.”

As DEI representatives often point out, ‘Getting much more efficient and automated with your office operations is critical to your success, but reaping the increased profitability from going paperless and automated is the bigger target we never lose track of.’ Projections for this refinery site has an annual savings of over $2 million dollars per year, in wasted operational expenses, should be recovered annually by year 2 and for every year after.

The Facilities Manager, also in charge of plant and refinery maintenance, issued the challenge of compliance and inspection reporting. “We can’t keep this dragging report paperwork for maintenance tickets and service calls on our backs. The time, expense and frustrations keep my department always weeks behind where we should be, perhaps farther behind.” With the new ECM system, DEI designed a series of Electronic Web Forms that refinery personnel could take on mobile devices around the plant and refinery. Instead of filling out lengthy paper forms and submitting them for difficult reviews, for what maintenance services were needed around the refinery plant, inspectors now fill out the tablet-based electronic forms with a stylus, and as they return to their plant offices, the forms automatically upload into their new ECM system, and auto-route to the supervisors who need to examine them. With business rules applied to the forms in simple JAVA expressions, about 80% of the forms just archive and route to no one, because the system knows those forms indicate no service is needed in that plant sector or on that device or major component. Only forms filled out by inspectors, that actually indicate a service issue, will be routed to the proper supervisor, who then issues the appropriate service ticket. “Our maintenance forms alone, save us such a huge amount of headache and time,” the assistant plant manager cited, “that we can now reduce a lot of hours both in the office and on the plant grounds, to go and do other, much more productive things… That we can now, just grab one of our field tablets, fill out the appropriate form, hit ‘submit’ and forget about it, that is true gold!”

The Procurement Company who contracted DEI for this refinery installation, is now looking at their other clients for implementing similar solutions at those enterprise’s main hub of operations.

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