Unlocking Deeper Insights: How the RAM Study Expands on the Fuels Study for Enhanced Reliability and Maintenance Strategies and Profitable Operations

For over 40 years, Solomon has been conducting the Worldwide Fuels Refinery Performance Analysis (Fuels Study) on a biennial basis to help clients understand how they compare against industry peers. Using this insight, they can discover where they can improve in terms of financial profit performance, operating expenses, reliability and maintenance, energy efficiency, staffing, and product quality.

In 1996, Solomon introduced the International Plant Reliability and Maintenance Effectiveness Study (RAM Study) to provide clients with a more in-depth analysis of the primary casual factors impacting plant reliability and maintenance effectiveness. The RAM Study evaluates reliability (based on monetized downtime) and maintenance performance (maintenance and reliability spending) metrics of production operations to assess the extent to which the reliability and maintenance strategies are optimized.

If you have participated or are considering participating in the Fuels Study, you may be questioning how participating in the RAM Study creates additional value when the Fuels study already analyzes reliability and maintenance and identifies cost and availability opportunities.

The answer: The Fuels Study is effective in identifying cost and availability gaps, that in essence represent measures of the effectiveness of your maintenance and reliability programs. However, the RAM Study can take that analysis a step further by deep diving into those programs to determine if you have a solid foundation for sustained success or if you have some programmatic issues that may indicate future performance issues. The RAM insight gained from the Fuels Study is useful, but it’s only a sliver of the insight you can get from jointly participating in the RAM Study as well.

For example, the RAM table in the Fuels Study report shows your total turnaround downtime but does not dive deeper into identifying potential reasons for why annualized downtime could be higher than your peers. However, since the RAM Study analyzes turnarounds in further detail, it can better identify potential reasons for downtime discrepancies between peers and determine if your strategy, turnaround (T/A) philosophy, and work execution have opportunities for improvement.

1. Is the duration gap occurring in the shutdown phase, execution and/or the startup phase of the T/A?
2. Is the phase which the duration gap is in causing the discrepancy between peers? Could it be that you execute more work in a T/A than your peers do?
3. Does your scope have more heat exchangers being opened, control vales pulled, pumps/compressors being overhauled, vessels being opened, etc.?

The RAM Study yields the detail to answer these questions by analyzing which phase of a T/A the duration gap is in, the percentage of equipment worked on in the previous turnaround, and opportunities to reduce scope. It also looks at T/A planning activities when the T/A strategy was developed, as well as scope freeze, contracts confirmed, schedule completed, etc. to identify T/A planning improvement opportunities.

RAM is just a part of what the Fuels Study measures. It provides some RAM insight, but the RAM Study is fully focused on your reliability and maintenance strategy, so it is able to produce more detail for you to make more focused RAM-related improvements.

In terms of cost, the Fuels Study identifies your total cost spend opportunities. This is key to improving your refineries’ overall margin performance through operational cost savings or margin enhancements.

But if you were then asked any of the following questions, would you know the answer?

• How do you spend your maintenance dollars?
• Are you spending it all on immediate corrective work or on corrective work that can be done later?
• Is there a lot of spend on time-based preventative maintenance work or condition-based preventative maintenance?
• Are there opportunities to improve rotating, fixed or Instrumentation & Electrical (I&E) equipment reliability?
• Are you efficiently using your resources to be proactive and not reactive in your maintenance work?

The RAM Study breaks down where and how you are spending in maintenance to better identify cost reduction and improvement opportunities. It identifies if your spending is for corrective, preventative, or improvement work, compares it to top quartile performers, and establishes spend metrics for fixed, rotating, and I&E equipment.

The RAM Study evaluates reliability program foundational activities to identify if there is a solid foundation for sustained success or if there are some programmatic issues that may indicate future performance issues. Some of the activities looked at in the reliability programs are:

• Is there evidence of a documented improvement process?
• Is there a reliability-centered program in place?
• Does the program leverage risk-based inspection methodology?
• Are there assigned criticality rankings?
• Have they completed root cause analyses (RCAs) to guide actions?
• Can you identify the use of any of the actions from the top ten bad actors list? Is there closure of the top ten bad actors list?

In addition, the RAM Study analyzes maintenance efficiency of reliability programs in more detail than the Fuels Study does. Attention to work delivery (maintenance efficiency) is critical to profitable operational success. Maintenance efficiency is evaluated by analyzing planning/scheduling compliance, technician training, review of contractors/quality assurance of work, MRO kitting/delivery, library of job plans, and routine maintenance workflow process adherence.

Solomon continues to invest in the RAM Study in preparation for the upcoming study year. In the spring of 2019, the Solomon RAM Study team hosted an Advisory Council meeting with existing and potential clients, who were leaders in the industry, to understand how to advance and improve the RAM Study. From that meeting, the following study enhancements were made:

Maintenance and reliability are interdependent, so the challenge is optimizing your strategy to achieve excellent and sustainable performance in both. Study data shows that top-RAM performers are those with the lowest combined maintenance costs and lowest loss of production due to reliability reasons. The difference between the best and worst performers reveals that an optimized strategy can be worth 7% of your plant replacement value (Figure 1).

The Fuels Study delivers valuable metrics for your overall fuel refinery operations, although jointly participating in the RAM Study will ensure that you have a core understanding of how effective your maintenance and reliability programs are. If your Fuels Study results are not great, the RAM Study can help you understand the foundational practices and strategies that need to be addressed to turn your performance around. Even if you receive top-quartile results, how confident are you that your maintenance and reliability programs are sustainable and will yield equal or better profitable performance for years to come? Participating in the RAM Study will provide you with the assurance you need to ensure true, long-term profitability.

Subscribe to receive periodic emails based on your area(s) of interest: Refining, Chemicals, Upstream, Midstream, Power Generation, Reliability & Maintenance.