MOTOR OIL, Corinth Refineries S.A. is an energy group based in Greece. It was founded in 1970 and its refinery in the region of Corinth counts among the top refineries in Europe. The company plays a leading role in crude oil refining and marketing of petroleum products in the country, as well as the greater Eastern Mediterranean region, supplying its customers with a wide range of high-quality products. Motor Oil produces 185,000 barrels of crude oil each day with a workforce of 2,500 employees and exports to more than 45 countries. The refinery along with its ancillary plants and fuel distribution facilities constitutes the largest privately-owned industrial complex in Greece.
Recently Mr. Dimitrios Michalopoulos, Head of Industrial Applications at Motor Oil explained how his company improved Environmental, Health and Safety processes. These are of significant importance to the company’s success to keep incidents at a minimum and ensure a safe work environment for its employees.
Replacing Manual Incident Management Processes
Over many years incident management processes were cumbersome and manual.
Mr. Michalopoulos said “We have three categories of incidents: incidents where someone was hurt e.g. through a fire, near misses and safety observations. In the past, the Incident Management process was based on spreadsheets. In case of an incident, refinery engineers had to fill a predefined word file form and e-mail it to our Health and Safety department. As there were no predefined field values, employees were free to enter texts without getting any system-based assistance and control.” He continued “As a result, it had been very difficult to generate any relevant KPIs as the entire process was manual.”
The assignment of Incident Managers was carried out by the Health and Safety Section Head without adequate traceability on what when happened and who was actually acting as the responsible incident manager.
The executive continued “The Investigation and root cause analysis process was executed completely offline and corrective or preventive actions that were decided to be executed resulted from the investigation process. All that was recorded in shared spreadsheet files and progress was communicated via email.”He added “It is obvious that monitoring of corrective or preventive actions was a cumbersome and time-consuming task for all Incident Managers. The preparation of KPIs and reports based on unstructured data was a challenging, manual and cumbersome process with a high risk of human error.”
Taking a New Approach to Overcome Challenges
The company had to take a new approach to overcome the challenges. Mr. Michalopoulos explained “All the above challenges related to an insufficient quality of Incident Management and the amount of time required for managing them on a daily base including to prepare KPIs and reports let us to the decision of deploying a new and integrated solution based on SAP ERP.”
Project Objectives and Key Success Factors
In terms of objectives and key success factors Mr. Michalopoulos pointed out “Increasing employee participation and awareness in Health & Safety processes was one of the key objectives for our project.” He added “We wanted to introduce an intuitive way for making incident reporting easier for everyone in the refinery. Additionally, another important objective was to standardize our Incident Management processes.” Based on the refinery’s official procedures it was important to Motor Oil that every employee should be able to report an incident or a safety observation. To raise employee awareness the company also set up a rewards program.
Meeting Strategic Goals with a Modern Solution
Motor Oil evaluated the SAP Environment, Health and Safety (SAP EHS) Applications Suite and in particular the Incident Management component of SAP EHS turned out to best cover its requirements. “We can rely internal procedures on it”, said Mr. Michalopoulos and continued “and our IT Infrastructure is based on SAP. Therefore, we wanted to benefit from leveraging integrated data from other SAP solutions and be able to prepare consolidated reports without developing complex interfaces.”
The SAP EHS Incident Management solution is deployed in the Motor Oil Refinery and the business owner is the Health and Safety Section. “All 1,500 refinery employees can now use the system and the interactive forms can be filled by everyone”, remarked the executive. Moreover, the solution is used by the Incident Managers in the Health and Safety section as well as by refinery section and refinery department heads which comprise about 50 people.
Improved and Automated Reporting
“We deployed the new system in July 2021 with assistance from Real Consulting IT Business Solutions S.A., therefore it has been productive for only a few months and it is consequently still early to determine safe metrics about the benefits”, said Mr. Michalopoulos. He continued “Overall, the quality of our health and safety processes and the time required for managing incidents have significantly improved”, and added “what we are already seeing is”:
• Increased awareness of employees and higher compliance with internal and external safety
regulations and standards
• Standardized and eased incident reporting on a tablet for all 1,500 refinery employees and
management team
• Time savings by 25-30% in the Health & Safety team for managing incidents and reporting thanks
to automated workflows, pre-defined KPI’s and interactive forms allowing them to focus on higher
value-add tasks
• Availability of up-to-date online reports with latest incident information details, enabling fast
decision-making and advanced analytics
• Simplified and documented incident investigation and root cause analysis processes automatically
trigger corrective and preventive action that can be monitored and tracked with regard to their
progress
• Cost savings thanks to integration with the SAP Human Resources system to immediately
access refinery employee details and with SAP Plant Maintenance to easily retrieve functional
locations and equipment
The New Solution Supports Corporate Goals
SAP EHS helps meeting Motor Oil’s corporate goals. The executive remarked “The nature of Motor Oil Group’s business operations, such as refining, storage, transportation and marketing of petrochemical products make occupational health and safety a matter of high importance and a top priority to us. Our management’s commitment to it is absolute and permanent to ensure a safe working environment. We take an ongoing and systematic approach for the improvement of health and safety issues”, said Mr. Michalopoulos. The executive added “Based on this strategy, SAP EHS plays a vital role to us.”
Future plans comprise to implement additional software components. Mr. Michalopoulos continued “In addition to SAP EHS Incident Management, we deployed Audit Management and our next steps are to implement Risk Assessment, Workplace Sampling and CO2 Emissions Management. We will also enhance the integration with SAP Plant Maintenance to enable creating plant maintenance notifications dynamically.”
He concluded saying “And in general, our SAP S/4 HANA green field implementation is in progress and considered as the Digital Core of the transformation process at our company. In addition, SAP Analytics Cloud was selected as our strategic tool for planning and budgeting processes at group level.”
Request a demo to learn how to respond and recover while ensuring the safety of employees and customers in times of change with integrated EHS management and click here to read the Motor Oil Business Transformation Study.
Also, request a report here how empowering employees with intelligent systems and data help them manage unforeseen events in near-real-time and make more informed decisions.
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