CountryMark takes its turnaround digital
Digitalization is beneficial for turnarounds and sites of any size, with a clearly justifiable ROI. This was proven recently by CountryMark, a unique refinery located in Mount Vernon, Indiana, employing 190 refinery personnel and producing 30,000 barrels a day. They selected MobideoSTO to digitalize their recent turnaround - a planned, 16-day event, last performed 6 years ago - involving over 12,000 tasks, 27,000 manhours, about 600 contractors working day and night, and a total of 750 workers.
What did CountryMark achieve through digitalization?
At a recent webinar in conjunction with Reuters’ Downstream Conference, Daniel Goulet, Director of Customer Success at Mobideo sat down with CountryMark personnel Dave Austin, Turnaround Operations & Training Supervisor and Curt Conyers, Turnaround Manager, to review their experiences from their first digital turnaround. Here are some examples of the subjects discussed:
- Integrating an existing Primavera schedule: All the steps from every work order or work task that had to be performed were integrated very easily and quickly into MobideoSTO, after which it was possible to successfully assign different tasks to different roles.
- Getting workers and contractors onboard with digitalization: Understanding the benefits, duties, and responsibilities, together with appropriate training, were key to achieving worker and contractor buy-in to digitalization. They found MobideoSTO very simple to use and easy to train. As one of their turnaround contractors noted:
“Hey, this thing is pretty slick. This is so much better than me trying to keep track, go back to the office, make a little spreadsheet and try to tell my boss and try to coordinate things together.”
- Using real-time data and BI reports to plan forward and support decision-making: Real-time data and BI reports changed the way CountryMark managed their turnaround. In previous turnarounds, daily meetings of all leaders involved each participant explaining what had been done. Digitalization changed this, particularly since MobideoSTO displays all the real-time data and status of every task on digital wallcharts. The real-time data enhanced decision-making, in addition to transforming daily meetings to discussions on future events and assets, such as shifting equipment or people. And the digital wallcharts also enabled offsite personnel – particularly CountryMark’s Operations Manager, in this case - to track the progress of the turnaround offsite, from any place, and at any time.
- Making processes easier and faster: Digitalization with MobideoSTO made many processes easier and faster, ensuring that CountryMark completed the turnaround on-time, and in-budget. Examples included:
- Scheduling and Rescheduling: The scheduler was able to keep things moving forward and schedule, and not just perform time-consuming updates. She was able to actually re-sequence events with more certainty, according to the actual progress in the field. MobideoSTO enabled the pushing of data back into P6 and obtaining better 3-day and 3-shift lookaheads.
- Change Management: As Curt Conyers notes: “With the change management plans that Mobideo provides, we were able to ease a lot of those concerns that we had, and show that definitively it was something that was not going to be a serious issue.”
- Materials Management: MobideoSTO connects directly to existing planning systems, ensuring that once materials arrive on site, they can all be appropriately assigned. Utilizing the tablet capabilities, photographing the location on the shelf and tagging the GPS location, contractors coming to work knew exactly where the materials were located.
- Discovery Work Management: MobideoSTO simplifies and manages the discovery process, from initiation in the field, to gathering information, and automatically assigning to the appropriate person to create the repair plan.
Learn more about CountryMark’s experiences
“Would I ever do a turnaround non-digitally? I wouldn’t want to. I don’t know why we would go backwards.”
Kim Smock, VP of Operations, CountryMark
The CountryMark refinery turnaround illustrates how digitalization is beneficial to any turnaround/site size, ensuring completion on-time and in-budget. By integrating technology, implementing automation, and connecting the workforce, MobideoSTO improved turnaround performance and efficiency, providing CountryMark with a range of benefits, particularly:
- Real-time tracking – knowing what is happening, as it happens
- Reliability, accountability, and trustworthiness of contractors
- Reduction in manual, mundane tasks to ease workloads and increase efficiency
- Reduction of paperwork to a minimum
- Improvement of communication between everyone involved in the turnaround
Learn more. Download highlights of this webinar NOW.