Main content | back to top
Maximise profitability
With market conditions in flux and the business environment becoming increasingly competitive, are you finding it progressively more challenging to exploit your assets fully and to plan and execute reliable, value-adding investments?
A successful capital project can create competitive advantage, but its success can depend on the accuracy of your economic assumptions. Key decisions involving issues such as technology selection, strategic location, choice of feedstock and supply logistics can influence your project's viability. Projects based on incorrect strategic assumptions and overoptimistic expectations may not meet their profitability targets. Project execution is also strategically crucial.
Informing capital investment decisions
Investing in a new facility is one of the most crucial – and complex – decisions that a company faces. It can shape the future of a business. Generally, many different options can be identified for meeting society’s needs; the skill is to find the investment option that is most robust in strategic, economic and technical terms.
Through site-specific Masterplanning Consultancy, Shell Global Solutions aims to help you to understand the market; identify a long-term business strategy; and avoid piecemeal solutions that may only meet short-term requirements.
In search of capital excellence
Building a large and complex plant, and revamping or installing process units, are all enormous undertakings. But the greatest tests often come during commissioning and start-up.
Global Solutions has catalogued the hundreds of business processes and operational steps that projects entail. Through the Operations Implementation Programme–Flawless‡ Project Delivery (OIP–FPD) process, we draw on our considerable experience to help identify potential project pitfalls.
Flawless, right-first-time operational start-up requires systematic preparation. We can assist you by developing a fully integrated action plan that embraces all the activities, such as project work, commissioning, start-up and turnaround, that require operational input.
This may involve providing clearly defined performance indicators to help establish expectation levels and applying robust techniques to help systemically identify and mitigate historical flaws and hidden novelties.
The aim is to minimise capital and operational costs, enhance plant availability and reliability, and reduce time to optimal operations.
‡Flawless is a Shell trademark.
Articles
Industry leaders gather to share ideas (PDF, 94 KB) - opens in new window
Case study
Brochure
Maintaining your competitiveness in today’s fast-moving and competitive environment requires dynamism, determination and vision. Market demands, legislation and deregulation are just some of the factors that can affect operating margins.
Optimising organisational design
The effective use of personnel is vital for maximising operating efficiency. Could you achieve the same productivity with fewer people in key business areas? How effective is your cross-functional communication? After an organisational effectiveness review, in which we interview staff at all levels, we may suggest redesigning your organisation. This may include structural amends, optimising staffing levels or implementing new business processes and management systems.
Hydrocarbon management fully exploits resources
The operational strategies of the past may not deliver the efficiencies needed in today’s competitive markets. Our goal is to help clients to use their existing assets better and to help maximise their margins by challenging plant operations; expanding thinking beyond the traditional boundaries; and applying best practices and innovations.
Working alongside local staff, Global Solutions’ specialist Hydrocarbon Margin Improvement Programme teams analyse a refinery or petrochemical plant to look for opportunities for margin improvement. Examples of focus areas include tailoring cut-point strategies to minimise product quality giveaway; identifying synergies at the refinery–petrochemicals interface; and optimising operating strategies.
Smart technologies for remote monitoring
Operators of unmanned wells can leverage computerised monitoring systems to make optimum use of human resources while helping maximise production through the management of real-time variations in flow rates and volume. Global Solutions’ FieldWare‡ suite of applications uses a combination of sensors, transmitters and smart alarms to provide real-time monitoring and surveillance so that multiple wells can be remotely monitored and controlled.
Remote monitoring techniques can also add value in downstream facilities. For instance, Shell software is often used during the start-up of new complex process units to help provide clients with a new level of reassurance at lower cost. The network-based system enables Global Solutions’ consultants to monitor plant activity and provide technical assistance promptly once a problem occurs without being on-site.
‡FieldWare is a Shell trademark.
Articles
Case studies
Fact sheets
Monitor your offshore solids more precisely (PDF, 66 KB) - opens in new window
Multiphase flow- Solutions for oil and gas production (PDF, 62 KB) - opens in new window
Industry-leading companies view operations and maintenance not as charges against their businesses, but as opportunities to add value. However, efforts to enhance asset reliability, which can lead to better availability, can often work against an organisation’s technical integrity and cost reduction drives.
Shell Global Solutions’ operational excellence programme integrates asset management processes; risk and reliability management tools; and health, safety and environmental management systems. The goal is to implement sustainable improvements that are designed to help maximise plant availability and improve asset performance.
Our programmes have identified reductions of up to 60% (the average is 25%) in annual maintenance costs for clients spanning a wide range of industrial sectors. There are also additional benefits; for example, at one facility, supplementary earnings of $34 million a year have been achieved through improved plant availability.
Asset management
Enhanced maintenance performance involves raising your plant reliability and availability, and, at the same time, reducing the amount you spend on maintenance. Are the costs of your reactive maintenance tasks, repairs and production losses a substantial contributor to your total operating costs?
Understanding the interrelations between the many tasks involved and considering this specialist function holistically, rather than focusing on individual elements or single activities, can help to optimise these costs and increase your plant availability.
Global Solutions’ asset management improvement programme is a strategic review conducted in tandem with your staff, and it is designed to analyse your maintenance and reliability practices and identify areas for improvement. It aims to improve management of equipment reliability and technical integrity; reduce work volumes; improve work planning and scheduling; and enhance workforce effectiveness and efficiency of work execution.
Risk and reliability management
Maintenance cost savings and increased revenues may be achieved by integrating risk information into the decision-making process. Our risk-based decision-making system is designed to help clients to develop efficient maintenance and inspection strategies that are designed to achieve their desired plant availability levels. Our suite of risk assessment services includes Shell reliability-centred maintenance (S-RCM‡), Shell risk-based inspection (S-RBI‡), and safety instrumented functions (SIFPRO‡).
‡SIFPRO, S-RBI and S-RCM are Shell trademarks.
Case studies
In search of excellence – Japan Energy Corporation Mizushima (PDF, 696 KB) - opens in new window
Turnaround optimisation programmes (PDF, 480 KB) - opens in new window
TOA Oil Ohgimachi Refinery (PDF, 125 KB) - opens in new window
TOA Oil Kawasaki Refinery (PDF, 171 KB) - opens in new window
Shell Gabon MERIT (PDF, 228 KB) - opens in new window
Shell Stanlow Risk & Reliability Management (PDF, 219 KB) - opens in new window
Refiners’ focus on working capital has increased in recent years. Inventory management, planning, scheduling and energy optimisation can all play a key role in reducing costs to help promote profitability.
Working capital management
Approximately 80% of a refinery’s costs are for the purchase of crude oil. For refiners that are servicing large debts, the effective and efficient use of capital can be a major profit driver.
Shell Global Solutions’ Opportunity Confirmation Programmes aim to help organisations to enhance their operational and economic performance. A key area of focus is often the introduction of strictly disciplined working capital management. The buying and scheduling of crude oil, stockholding strategies and managing the total crude oil supply chain all come under the microscope.
Enhancing the supply chain
Supply and distribution networks have traditionally been seen as unavoidable necessities that add to business costs. But progressive companies are increasingly recognising that value can be generated in these areas.
At Global Solutions, we can assist customers to help maximise value from highly complex supply chains by helping them to design and optimise the logistics of their incoming raw materials, finished product deliveries and transfer of intermediates. Solutions may include asset optimisation, constraint debottlenecking and the introduction of tools, techniques and best practices that may enhance the flow of goods and information.
Optimising the workforce
Comparing a facility’s utilisation of human resources with industry indexes for similar operations can identify opportunities to optimise the workforce. Such studies use our proprietary software, which is based on the Shell Manpower Index, to benchmark manpower levels.
Intelligent energy management
Experience shows that major energy-saving opportunities can be uncovered in most plants, even those that have already addressed care-and-maintain issues such as steam leaks, through the introduction of intelligent process manipulation measures. Examples include adjusting distillation targets, heat integration and optimising equipment operating parameters. Re-engineering a plant’s systems and processes, for example, by updating shutdown and start-up procedures and applying asset-management practices, can also lead to energy savings.
Case studies
Achieving energy efficiency (PDF, 261 KB) - opens in new window
Hydrocarbon Asia – Making the most of energy (refineries) (PDF, 2693 KB) - opens in new window
Process and plant optimisation (petrochemical plants) (PDF, 1098 KB) - opens in new window
Reducing the energy footprint (PDF, 208 KB) - opens in new window
Brochure