Advanced Petrochemical Upgrades GE Vernova’s APM

Advanced Petrochemical is one of the major players in the petrochemical industry across the Middle East and North Africa region, delivering high quality of products through innovation.

Advanced Petrochemical started the construction of its plants in May 2005, and the first commercial production was on March 2008. The Jubal Industrial City plant, located in the Eastern coast of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is designed to produce 455,000 tons of propylene (nameplate capacities) per year. The products are marketed locally and globally through well-renowned off-takers. The company’s products are used in plastic applications such as cast film, BOPP films, fibers, filaments, woven tapes, non woven fabrics, and injection molding.

Advanced Petrochemicals ha multiple key challenges to optimizing maintenance cost, improving reliability and increasing production rate. The company has taken multiple initiatives by carrying out key investment projects to increase production rate and increase profitability.
In addition, management has been proactively investing in asset management improvement programs, developing work process to increase a reliability culture within the organization. As an outcome of these programs, the company requires the right tools and technology to support these programs. GE Vernova’s APM software has been deployed to support the company's initiatives. And to go further, the company decided to adopt the latest technology available by upgrading to the latest version, V4.6.2.

The project has also been extended to review key changes and challenges the company has been facing for years and with the support of GE Vernova’s APM team and Advanced Petrochemical reliability team. The upgrade project has fulfilled its intended objective in less than the due date.

The upgrade project started on June 2022, with an objective of having the solution live within six months. At early implementation phases, GE Digital performed the hardware sizing exercise (number of servers, memory …etc.) required to host the APM V4.6, however the hardware availability as well as its maintenance cost represented some challenges. With a close understanding of Advanced Petrochemical's infrastructure capacity and forecasting, the estimated number of users, the hardware size was optimized, thus reducing the overall hardware and maintenance cost without impacting the APM user experience.

The upgrade was further accelerated by two months, so that Advanced could gain value of the solution as early as possible. This challenge required a tight collaboration between the two companies. A close follow up on the project management and Advanced Petrochemical responsiveness were two key factors that contributes successfully to the achievement of the live solution on Sept. 26, 2022, a full two months ahead of the original schedule. The company has now access to multiple new features that will be used to facilitate the new improvement programs as such the list of the many new features that the company will acquire with the upgrade.

Enhanced Inspection Strategies
Challenge: Very short inspection strategies generated by RBI, sometimes mislead the inspectors and not acceptable by external auditors.
Value: With V4 upgrade, RBI will generate the very descriptive Inspection strategies, and this will ensure high effectiveness and treatability of the inspection activities and avoid any compliance problems.

Start utilizing data analysis and presentation APM tools.
Challenge: it takes long time to prepare a report or presentation slides that is based on CMMS work history data. And this activity needs to be repeated many times a year.
Value: GE Vernova’s APM provides ADVANCED team with the tools that help them pre-build and pre-configure a real time information or graphs that they can use it anytime during the year in their reports and presentations.

Unified understanding of assets risk by presenting it in corporate risk matrix
Challenge: Every team analyzing the risk from their perspective (RCM, RBI and ACA) and there is no Common ground that is understandable for everyone.
Value: APM upgrade helped Advanced to map risk values to one corporate risk matrix that allow better understanding to the risk, avoid confusion, and meet internal and external audits expectations.

APM supporting during compliance audits
Challenge: it takes time to answer compliance auditor questions because the data is in different places and the supporting information are not in one place
Value: with the Upgrade Advanced team started utilizing many system capabilities to store reference document, proofs, justifications…etc. electronically within APM. and predefine queries and dashboard that present this information.

Data loaders and exporting/importing tools
Challenge: Data entry is taking time and it consumes resources time
Value: With APM upgrade, The Data loader tool will help ADVANCED to load their data in APM in a faster way with a proper quality check that happens during the loading jobs.

Bulk features time saving
Challenge: Supervisors and managers might have a limited time to review and approve reports
Value: APM upgrade introduce bulk review and approval tools that will help save the managers and supervisor’s time.

APM Standard Dashboards
Challenge: Data quality is always a challenge
Value: APM upgrade provides a standard dashboard that tests and present the data and the user can easily define the gaps and data issues and the fix it.

Compliance with IEC61511 standard
Challenge: IEC61511 have been updated recently in 2017, with key changes in the calculation, these changes are not currently supported in the existing tool
Value: GE VAPM upgrade provided Advanced with an upgrade view, features to full fill the new standard requirement to match the IEC61511 standard, in addition to the access of new Exida failure rate data.

Improvement in Reliability Key Metrics
Challenge: Current metrics and score cards have been outdated with the changes in reliability program and required to be updated to support the reliability improvement program.
Value: A key visibility for management, understand key bad actors in the asset operation to allow better tracking of value initiative program

New Site installation
Challenge: Advanced have expanded its key operations and requires having better control over the new assets installed.
Value: Overall control over the new site assets, developing asset performance management program to support key improvement initiative in the new plant.