SABIC Adopts APM Culture on the Path to Manufacturing Excellence

SABIC is the second largest globally diversified chemical company, with 40,000 employees working in 63 facilities and 19 technology and innovation centers around the world. The company introduces approximately 150 new products every year and operates and maintains more than $90 billion in total assets.

Included in its product offerings are basic and intermediate chemicals, polymers, fertilizers, metals, and plastics. Over the past 20 years, SABIC’s production capability has increased five-fold, and in 2014, SABIC’s total production reached nearly 70 million metric tons. SABIC executives and engineers believed strongly that work process maturity, data quality, asset reliability, safety, operating costs, and manufacturing excellence were highly dependent on each other, so they decided to adopt a global corporate culture of asset performance management (APM) to achieve the long-term goals of sustainability and manufacturing excellence.

SABIC first determined that it needed to adopt an APM-focused corporate mindset. To install an APM culture across the organization, SABIC trained more than 20,000 of its employees in the concepts of GE Digital's Asset Performance Management (formerly Meridium Enterprise APM).

Next, SABIC followed a multi-step approach to implementing APM, starting with production loss accounting (PLA). This was facilitated by standardizing the practices of monitoring production deviation triggers, classifying incidents, identifying performance killers, benchmarking, measuring compliance and data quality, analyzing data and trending procedures, and developing recommendations and closure for the PLA process.

SABIC also ranked assets by criticality to effectively allocate resources company-wide. By 2013, SABIC completed 100 system and equipment criticality assessments for all assets (including piping), as well as reliability instrumented systems studies for safety and instrument critical functions. Risk based inspection (RBI) studies were conducted for all static equipment and reliability centered maintenance (RCM) studies were performed for all critical A-rated systems, and 28% of B-rated systems. Finally, root cause analysis (RCA) was conducted on all incidents related to:

• Production incidents (stoppage/slowness)
• Environment
• Health, safety, and security incidents
• Asset failures (sporadic/chronic)
• Product quality
• Customer complaints

Growth analysis was selected as an APM-effectiveness key performance indicator (KPI) to track the changes in the mean time between failures (MTBF). With APM implemented, studies showed an improvement in MTBF for pipes from 172 days to more than 2,125 days, a 1,135% improvement. Studies also verified a reduction in both leak rate and number of failures.

SABIC also understands its reliability-focused culture will always be a work in progress, and is making great strides in fostering reliability as everyone’s responsibility through training and internal branding initiatives.