New maintenance strategy delivers many benefits

Using proven methodologies, specialist companies can now help process industry companies achieve optimized asset management by reducing time, money and manpower for repairs and maintenance. One example is the biggest oil refinery in Bulgaria.

Many industrial companies want to reduce time, money and manpower for repairs and maintenance, but don’t want to jeopardize equipment reliability and safety or endanger the environment. For many companies, it is a complex task, requiring experience and expertise that they do not possess in-house. They need help from an outside specialist company.

One example is the situation at the biggest refinery in Bulgaria. This company has an annual capacity of seven million tonnes of crude oil – more than 140,000 barrels a day.

Despite its undoubted success, the refinery has a 10-year plan that includes several programs to improve performance. One of the programs will sound familiar: They want to improve reliability, safety, health and environmental issues while at the same time lowering maintenance and repair costs.

Lacking the specialist expertise
Knowing they lacked the special expertise to develop a maintenance strategy with such seemingly contradictory objectives, the refinery management invited proposals from two companies with experience in the field. They asked the companies to put forward ideas for a limited-scale pilot operation for planning and implementing a maintenance strategy on one of the refinery’s four atmospheric distillation units. They compared the two proposals and then chose SKF Bulgaria as the company to carry through the pilot project.
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