Keytree redefine how maintenance work is regulated

The customer produces energy to power economic growth and lift people out of poverty. With around 74,000 employees, it operates in 70 countries worldwide: finding and producing oil and gas on land and offshore, moving energy around the globe, and manufacturing and marketing fuels and raw materials used in thousands of everyday products, from mobile phones to food packaging.

Its refineries work around the clock refining crude oil to produce a variety of products including diesel, gasoline and petroleum but to ensure their continued safe operation these vast industrial processing plants require significant but focused periods of planned maintenance called ‘turnarounds’.

“This is a testament to the rigorous end-to-end approach Keytree has taken for the project with full business engagement and the acknowledgement that this IT&S project contributes to improving the overall safety and efficiency of our Castellon and Rotterdam refineries.”

Customer Project Manager

Control of Work – providing access at the right time and at the right level

The day to day operations at these refineries depend on a full working infrastructure, so some maintenance activities require full site closure. Getting the refinery back up and running as safely as possible and as quickly as possible requires detailed planning and coordination of maintenance activities during these ‘refinery turnaround’ periods.

These turnarounds involve a significant number of individual contractors who are on-site with thousands of jobs to complete. Controlling work undertaken, including access and approval to work, is critical. Site access is controlled and monitored by various teams so to support and improve these processes, the customer worked alongside Keytree to create the Control of Work (CoW) application.

CoW lets users plan maintenance workloads at a refinery in advance and also monitor overall progress. A comprehensive system of approvals ensures a ‘permit to work’ can be issued for a maintenance task, providing operatives with a license that covers details of job specific risks and how to avoid them plus a time window to complete the work. As the customer requires close control of these time windows, Keytree implemented a mobile solution allowing engineers to efficiently scan permits at the end of their shift, update on progress, and request extensions for the task undertaken.

If a task needs to be carried out in isolation, Control of Work highlights the safety implications via Simultaneous Operation functionality, ensuring potentially disruptive or dangerous jobs do not impact on each other. Each of the refineries, its assets and equipment is mapped on the system, and every maintenance activity is shown on these detailed maps, clearly highlighting where there is a time/location clash.

The customer Project Manager also shared the excellent feedback received from the Refinery Leadership team who added: “We have several notes of recognition for the effort and time we have put into this project to make it a success. This is great news and a significant milestone for the CoW project and IT&S as a whole; this kind of support and endorsement does not happen by chance.”

The solution is live in the refineries at Castellon and Rotterdam, and there are currently over 600 users of the solution at these refineries, with several thousand Task Risk Assessments generated per month. There are two turnarounds per year per refinery, plus a significant turnaround every five years supported via the application. A roll out plan to further sites is in progress, with three more refineries in Europe and a number in the US.

“We have several notes of recognition for the effort and time we have put into this project to make it a success. This is great news and a significant milestone for the CoW project and IT&S as a whole; this kind of support and endorsement does not happen by chance.”

Customer Project Manager