Significant savings obtained thanks to reliable, accurate and well-distributed asset information.
Oryx Energies SA (Oryx) is one of Africa’s largest and longest-established independent providers of oil and gas products and services.
The company sources, supplies, stores and distributes the oil and gas products needed by consumers, businesses and maritime operations across sub-Saharan Africa. With operations in 17 countries through 24 subsidiaries, its main industrial facilities include a wide retail network with more than 220 service stations, LPG filling plants, liquid hydrocarbon depots and lubricant plants. Oryx boasts 1,500 direct employees of which nearly 25% are female and with more than 800 indirect jobs.
The company looked for a CMMS to support their corporate-wide maintenance activities and address a number of issues including asset information, maintenance task status and overall performance management.
Addressing preventive maintenance and tracking performance
As Downstream Maintenance Manager based in Las Palmas (Spain), Antonio González Pérez de Ontiveros leads a team of 65 technicians and third-party contractors located in different countries on the African continent. He has to ensure that maintenance policies and objectives are implemented in Oryx affiliates.
He also has to identify the training needs and resources to ensure compliance – Oryx is ISO 9001 certified – while balancing corrective and preventive actions to maintain productivity and improve performance.
Various, heterogeneous Office tools including Excel were used for maintenance follow-up. Corrective maintenance was carried out as well as several preventive maintenance works such as meter calibration and other legal inspections but maintenance activities needed to be better addressed in order to reduce breakdowns, have a better control of the equipment and, ultimately, demonstrate traceability.
Challenging goals to support overall performance
“Our aim was to develop a homogenous, long-term maintenance strategy across the group by means of a solution that would be easy to implement, user friendly – because our staff are not IT experts – and with little hardware requirements. A number of constraints had to be taken into account such as distance – some facilities, such as mines, are located in remote areas – different languages and time zones. Installing servers in various locations proved too complicated and costly”.
Between using an off-the-shelf tool, developing their own software and using standard office tools, Dimo Maint offered the best solution. In the end, having a cloud-based solution provided a cost-effective answer while ensuring tight budgetary control.
A demo to simulate the flow of information
Antonio and the team in charge of the implementation simulated the daily tasks of a local maintenance manager as well as the flow of information to be managed including workorders and the reporting capabilities based on the information supplied by the solution.
A Management Of Change Process (MOC) was initiated and the preliminary analysis took two months. The rest of all the options were evaluated between July until November 2020. IT and Legal came on board to complete the process, to support the selected solution and validate the final contract.
A 4-step rollout schedule
The CMMS was implemented in four phases and took approximately 8 months, which was quite fast in view of the number of sites and volume of work:
- Training of representatives of the 4 main lines of business (LPG, Lubricants, retail and Liquid Hydrocarbon) and design were done with guidance by the DIMO team.
- Las Palmas was used as the CMMS pilot site as this location already used such a tool in the past.
- Collection of the database information followed
- Rollout out of the CMMS in English and French Speaking Countries was followed by extensive training sessions
Some key figures of the maintenance activity
The 4 activities represent 22,765 assets in the database. The interface is very user-friendly, the representation of the assets (pipes, cars, tanks, pumps, boilers and even tools such as hoses) per country and plant is clear and comprehensive.
“DIMO Maint was quite helpful in helping us and our subsidiaries to list and populate the database with all our assets” explains Antonio.
49 maintenance people are currently using the DIMO Maint solution and Antonio would be willing to provide access to the solution to third-party contractors and affiliates. “Our collaboration with DIMO Maint was fair and communication was easy and fluent. On top of their software and project management skills, they were able to provide a solution to really match our needs”.
The workorder is the key element for the analysis of maintenance activities
The information provided with this regular analysis of works is essential to define the best maintenance strategies to achieve the maintenance objectives.
“We need to deliver quality and safety. So far, we issued 17,866 workorders. I can check which critical tasks were performed per country and affiliate, see ongoing and past preventive and corrective tasks, which contractor was used and the associated costs. Planned maintenance tasks are also listed in DIMO Maint. It is a very useful feature because I now have a schedule and can catch up on what maintenance technicians have to do over a month and anticipate what is needed in terms of budget resources”.
Significant changes and benefits for the organization
Oryx redefined their yearly preventive maintenance plan in all their installations. Major improvements were noticed in many areas:
- Better definition of yearly budget,
- Exhaustive information available for problem solving,
- Development of an information-based culture across the company,
- Increased asset life,
- Reduced downtime,
- Optimized spare parts inventory,
- Energy savings,
- Early detection of damage,
- Reduced maintenance cost.
According to Antonio: “The solution helped to optimize our maintenance tasks but also enabled our company to save money. Finance and top management can rely on accurate and better controlled information. Now, the budget does reflect reality and it’s not just a question of volumes”.
Future developments
DIMO Maint is not yet connected to any corporate IT tool. Oryx are currently in the process of migrating their ERP system. Ultimately the Dimo solution will be integrated into the new ERP by means of connectors. “We estimate a 5% ROI to be achieved after 3 years of operation” Antonio concludes.
