Saudi Aramco Shell Refinery Wins Emerson Excellence in Reliability Award

The Saudi Aramco Shell Refinery (SASREF) was recognized as Emerson's Reliability Program of the Year at the 2017 Emerson Global Users Exchange.

Emerson presented its annual Reliability Program of the Year award to the Saudi Aramco Shell Refinery (SASREF) at the 2017 Emerson Global Users Exchange, held Oct. 2 to 6 in Minneapolis.

The award was the culmination of a multi-year reliability effort across their 305,000 bpd refinery in Jubail, Saudi Arabia. In just three years, SASREF increased mechanical availability from 96% to nearly 98%, putting them in the Top Quartile for one of the industry’s most important benchmarks.

SASREF launched its Reliability Excellence Transformation program in 2014, seeking to create more bottom-line business value for the facility, originally built in 1985, by infusing a reliability and performance culture across the organization.

“People are the most important asset. None of this transformation is possible without having or investing in people,” said Yahya Ail Hamdi, SASREF engineer for maintenance strategy. “The folks at the top quartile are there and they stay there because they are improving and keep developing. We are committed to continuing learning and improving.”

Part of that program leveraged automation and digital tools and extensive training programs to help its digital workforce detect and resolve issues earlier. “By putting the right capabilities in front of their digital workers and reliability teams, they were able to increase the productivity and expertise of their digital workforce and drive overall business value by improving the overall availability of their refinery,” said Thomas Waun, general manager of Emerson’s newly launched Operational Certainty Consulting group.

By establishing new reliability organizations, moving from reactive to predictive maintenance, and improving work processes, SASREF mitigated 98% of threats to availability and reduced maintenance costs by 13.5%.

Emerson’s Reliability Program of the Year recognizes specific sites and reliability teams that are continually improving their reliability culture and programs and reflect the principles and values of Emerson’s Top Quartile strategy. For more information about Emerson’s Reliability Program of the Year, visit Emerson.com/reliabilityprogram.