APM Integrity Saves Major Oil & Gas Operation $230K

Having a proper Mechanical Integrity program is of utmost importance for Oil & Gas organizations of any size. It is even more important to have a program that is standardized and supported by the proper software at scale to limit safety concerns, risk, and operational in-efficiencies.

The below outlines how a major Oil & Gas facility used GE Digital’s Asset Performance Management Mechanical Integrity software to breakdown silos and generate more than $230,000 of returned value from their investment.

Existing Asset Integrity Systems at a major Oil and Gas facility were disjointed with multiple systems in place, and where data transfer from one system to another was predominantly manual and labor-intensive.

The Integrity personnel, including Inspection and RBI engineers were spending an excessive amount of time maintaining multiple data sources in various systems and spreadsheets. The manual nature of the process made it prone to human error, which could compromise the Integrity of Assets.

Moreover, the existing systems did not offer users with asset health insights that they could use on the collected field data, nor did it provide good visualization reports. In addition, the comprehensive anomaly management process is rudimentary.

This was leading to a significant amount of manpower cost incurred due to standalone mechanical integrity systems that operated in silos.

After discovering clear silos and their impact on the business, the following steps were taken to remediate:

• As part of the Use Case Facilitation Services, GED SMEs engaged closely with the company’s integrity leads to setup Inspection management, Thickness Monitoring and Risk Based Inspection programs. Historical data provided by the customer was uploaded to GE APM.

• The company’s Structural Integrity methodology was configured in APM. This would be the platform for managing the risk for structural assets and propose recommendations. GE APM has been deployed as the centralized integrity system for managing pressure systems and structures, and consequently visualize the risk within the platforms.

• GED SMEs engaged with the customer’s Integrity leads to showcase the end-to-end integrity modules and utilize the enterprise nature of the GE APM system to create an integrated work process, and how this will drive benefits to the overall integrity program.

• It has been demonstrated and agreed that the adoption of Inspection management, Thickness Monitoring and RBI modules will provide substantial value, including significant reductions in manpower required to drive the integrity program. The improved work efficiency will allow the integrity personnel to focus on solving other plant reliability issues.

By adopting APM Integrity and focusing on standardized adoption, the organization realized a $230,000 saving in manpower hours. This was due to ensuring that data was easily collected, shared, analyzed and acted on in a timely manner—therefore also reducing the risk of the operation.