“Digital maturity” for Refineries

Posted: June 06, 2024

A well-established meme reminds us of “people, processes and technologies” – don’t try to achieve or maintain higher level performance with only technology. This meme has been expanded over the years, but the point is made. One of the challenges is to articulate what “digital maturity” is, what is a useful and achievable improvement, and why.

Like the human body strengths, it is likely that any organization will have higher and lower “digital maturity” among its major business processes.

A lower “digital maturity” doesn’t imply failure – the organization is achieving its goals, although possibly inefficiently or unable to sustain the performance when major trends occur such as the workforce transition or market volatility.

A higher “digital maturity” is a competitive advantage, which in some cases can increase market capitalization by more than 10 times.

Many industrial organizations must improve their “digital maturity” because other initiatives such as acquisition, standardization, etc. are either too slow or insufficient to achieve the strategic goals.

The following table is a suggested categorization. It articulates 5 levels of “digital maturity” across people, process and technology, and it is important to remember that “maturity” in of these may defer from the others. Level 1 isn’t “bad” if the refinery is consistently achieving their targets and remains competitive, and level 5 might be only fantasy for many refineries. And it is important to remember that all improvement activities – including quality and safety – can’t improve more than one level at a time.

Many refineries are at level 2 in “processes” and “technology”, and “people” (culture) varies widely – from level 1 to level 3 and higher. The technology-driven activities often don’t address the “processes” and “people” aspects directly – for instance, how has the “technology” minimized the wasted time and skill of the specialists, or sustained a proactive culture?

Work must be transformed in at least one of the following 5 characteristics:

• Minimize Waste – finding & processing data.
• When—automated anticipation, earlier verification and agreement, often before situations or opportunities arise.
• Where—include remote, traveling workers.
• Who—optimize the experts’ participation (so that they can focus on improvements)
• How—planned, prescriptive and tracked teamwork The following diagram summarizes the work transformation, which is essential before focusing on technology:

Our experience in conducting “digital maturity” workshops often reveals that most refinery specialists and managers spend almost all of their time reacting and planning for the next day’s set of reactions; when we ask them what an “ideal” day would look like (not including vacation), many of them need time to consider how best to answer the question.

Although “journey” has become a cliché, it is especially true for digital maturity. The following simplified tables summaries 3 refinery companies, and each is implemented improvements based upon their cultures and current technology landscapes:

Digital maturity level 1 includes what some refiners have called the “messy desk” of software and information – which often results in users quickly abandoning “solutions”. In contrast, digital maturity level 4 has high user adoption and a culture of continuous improvement and preventing problems.