Marathon Petroleum Develops Collaborative Strategy for Optimizing APM

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With more than 125 years of experience in the energy business, Marathon Petroleum Corporation operates an integrated refining, marketing, and transportation system that is concentrated primarily in the Midwest, Northeast, East Coast, Southeast, and Gulf Coast regions of the United States. Since 1999, Marathon has been utilizing Asset Performance Management (APM) from Meridium (now acquired by GE Digital) for its day-to-day reliability needs across a number of its business units, and currently has over 1,300 APM users.

After implementing SAP, Marathon found that the modules were deeply customized and difficult to adapt to the existing reliability program. As a result, Marathon began looking into how to improve its overall operational support, as well as how to:

• More consistently implement new technology
• Get more out of existing enterprise asset management (EAM) and APM capabilities
• Improve quality and timeliness of issue resolution
• Augment staff with “as needed” APM experience

Marathon worked with its APM team to develop a customized operational support agreement to improve collaboration and assistance on technical support, functional consulting, strategic reviews, training, and everything in between. In an effort to solve issues more quickly, Marathon started working with a designated APM resource. This team member helped expedite implementation of new capabilities by having a more intimate knowledge of Marathon’s customer configurations as well as better evaluate existing capabilities and offer advice on how to improve platform use.

In addition, Marathon implemented a mix of functional onsite and technical offsite support, a working task list to use as a reference, and customized training.

With the operational support agreement, Marathon’s reliability team was able to stay up-to-speed and improve the quality of support and daily use of APM. The effort provided Marathon with the service, support, and flexible program design necessary for meeting its ongoing needs. In addition to the dedicated onsite and offsite support, Marathon also continues to hold monthly meetings to discuss current projects and issues, as well as any future plans for upgrades. This regular communication keeps everyone on the same page.