Astron Energy Transforms Crude Assay Management Process and Reduces Assay Creation Time by 50%
Astron Energy, a leading independent refiner in South Africa, re-architected its crude assay management process in three months to take over crude analysis and assay database maintenance previously managed by its super major parent company. AVEVA Unified Supply Chain, in the cloud, enabled Enterprise Crude Knowledge Management by streamlining crude analysis and new workflows for improved collaboration across diverse teams.
Astron Energy unlocked competitive advantage and maximized profitability by deploying a single application for crude oil evaluation, tracking cargo quality and variability, exploring potential blends, and accurately characterizing the oil crude feed to the refinery – enabling Enterprise Crude Knowledge Management.
Goals
- Quickly transform crude assay management process from reliance on super major parent to independent capability, without disruption to the business.
- Increase accuracy of flow rates and material properties, allowing teams to push operational limits and maximize profitability.
- Improve crude assay data management to easily share information across users and to automate workflows for efficient refinery operations and decision support.
Challenges
- Predicting characteristics of refinery feed from a central tank, that receives various crudes with limited mixing – inaccurate predictions result in $10,000 - $15,000 per day cost to the business.
- Managing additional assay management work and activities using existing refinery headcount.
- Building technology and processes to operate as an independent refiner.
Solutions
Results
- Complete re-design of crude assay management business process in less than three months with seamless transition for users.
- Over 50% reduction in time to create assays from laboratory samples with easy sharing to the planning team for LP modeling.
- Improved refinery margin through more accurate prediction of crude oil properties.
- Reduction in IT costs and faster software updates using AVEVA-hosted cloud solution.
“Our Oils Planning team are empowered with accurate crude assay predictions, easy knowledge sharing, and improved data management, giving us confidence to push operational limits and drive more profitable operations. We not only transformed our crude management processes without disruption to the business, we are now 50% faster.”
Louisa Botha – Refinery Planner
