Overview

As a worldwide energy leader, BP provides fuel and energy for their customers’ everyday life. BP’s Toledo refinery processes up to 160,000 barrels of crude oil per day and provides the Midwestern United States with gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, propane and asphalt.

When BP and Husky Energy had to upgrade the enterprise asset management system at their joint venture refinery at Toledo in Ohio, they conducted a competitive tender and chose Denver, based on their detailed response and 30-year track record of delivering hundreds of successful projects for BP.

The Challenge

BP-Husky Toledo (BP-H) had been using version 4.1 of IBM Maximo to manage key refinery maintenance activities for nearly 20 years. However, the system had reached end-of-life and was increasingly difficult to support.

BP-H needed to upgrade to IBM Maximo version 7.6 and standardise business processes across BP-H with its Cherry Point refinery in Washington, which could then become a template and further extended throughout its global downstream business.

The Cherry Point refinery was already running on IBM Maximo version 7.6 after an upgrade from IBM Maximo version 7.1. BP also wanted to create a Downstream OneMaximo Template that would ease the deployment process at other locations running IBM Maximo. These included their refinery in CherryPoint, USA, Kwinana, Western Australia and pipelines in the United States. 

A Critical Upgrade
BP and Husky Energy had reached a point at which a successful upgrade was critical to BP-H’s continued operation. “Maintenance in a refinery organisation is important from a safety perspective, and safety is paramount in the minds of an operation like BP,” says Paul Phelan, Senior Project Manager, Denver. “Maintenance also affects uptime and throughput. So if a system fails to keep processes running at an optimal level, it affects safety and performance as well as barrel-per-day outputs and consequently revenue.”
Denver could provide the level of expertise needed to deliver the project on-time, within budget and to the stringent requirements of the joint venture partners. “Our teams had worked with BP at the Bulwer Island operation in Queensland and at the Kwinana Refinery in Western Australia.“We’d also undertaken some ancillary work for BP at its head office in Melbourne,” says Phelan. “We had plenty of runs on the board and were a proven performer for the organisation.”