The client is the world’s largest oil corporation with the largest crude oil reserves and production. The company’s oil operations cover Saudi Arabia including territorial waters in the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea totaling more than 1.5 million sq. km and proven reserves of 259.8 billion barrels of oil. Its revenue stands at an excess of $200 billion, as of April 2008.

Oil export is the backbone of the client, using Single Point Mooring hoses the terminal department of the client ships around 4.5 million barrels of oil per day. Hence a comprehensive maintenance program to schedule, maintain, test and track respective hoses is essentially needed for a reliable export operation.

The existing in-house application lacked core business functionality, workflow procedures to alert respective operation & maintenance representatives. Unplanned outages of SPMs and the increase of oil spill incidents due to hose failure resulted in a number of inventories in the tank farm, an increase in ships’ waiting time (vessel queue became congested) and a high risk to the environment. To alleviate these problems, the client wanted a system which could stand up to their growing demands.

The main and the most important challenge was in defining a Solution that could track the service life of the SPM hoses. Another major challenge was in defining a forecast report that facilitated the terminal department in the planning and procurement of SPM hoses for the planned operating period.

Kaar’s team of consultant studied the clients existing applications and database systems and recommended a SAP business Solution which involved merging various processes across SAP PM, MM & QM. We achieved this by customizing them over SAP Plant Maintenance for SPM Hose Preventive Maintenance, Quality Management for SPM Hose inspection and materials management for tracking the SPM Hoses. On the technical front we customized master equipment record to capture all attributes of SPM. Using SAP workflow, we defined workflows relevant to approvers so that alerts are sent as mail attachment immediately.

By partnering with Kaar, the Client successfully implemented a SAP business Solution for the Terminal department to track and monitor the inspection schedule of SPM hoses and associated equipments and also to provide advanced notification messages of any planned outages, inspection or hoses due for replacement. In addition to replacing the existing database, advanced workflow notifications have been provided to alert the concerned maintenance personnel and avert any adverse situations which were major concerns with the previous SPM system. The new workflow developed using SAP workflow has streamlined these processes by automatically forwarding the approval forms and processes involved.