Let’s face it, the game has changed. Today’s petrochemical and energy market is more susceptible than ever before due to volatile markets, narrowing crack spreads, growing competition and many other known or unknown outside factors. Many experts believe the days of oil staying above $50 is long past us and the industry needs to face this reality.
Large turnarounds and projects have always been a source of inefficiencies and lost profits. These factors leak cash on a project slowly, but add up to millions over the course of days, weeks and months of a project:
- Permitting problems which delay first starts
- Early quits due to people leaving for the gate early
- Late starts due to people coming in late
- Lost time at the tool trailers
- Lost time looking for missing materials in the yards
- Inefficient worker movements during the shift (poor walking routes)
- Difficulty monitoring critical path
- Lost plant production
- Recordables and injured workers
- Lawsuits and legal fees
Conceivably, by making gains in monitoring Critical Path and improving manpower utilization, sites could see improvements in schedule by 10-15%. By gaining additional time with each employee every day, this could easily amount to savings of $5-$30MM depending on the size and scope of the project.
Many companies have looked to technology as a source of resolution to these problems. Everyone is looking for the next device that will solve their problem, or the big data company that get them the information they need to fix it, only to discover they spent millions of dollars on a solution that was never designed for their industry, or to address the challenges they have – basically a square peg solution for a round hole problem.
SmartConnect Smart Badge is the first device built for this industry, by industry experts, for the exact purpose of improving the industry problems listed above. It is a wearable that tracks the movement of people and equipment, creates a visualization of all this movement on specialized software, and then measures the success of the project. It is all monitored by some of the most skilled turnaround and project experts in the business which allows incremental changes to be made in near real-time plugging some of the leaks of the project.