The impact of re-engineering maintenance operations through time for a tower and a heater (A case study of Tobruk petroleum refinery Libya)

Ali F. Ali FADIEL, Salah H. Soliman Fiatore

ALHARIQA, iGrafx process software, re-engineering maintenance, Tobruk petroleum refinery

A Petroleum Refinery is a basic industrial facility that has a wide product range of products used as fuels and chemicals. Maintenance activities with a Petroleum Refinery affect very much its productivity. The maintenance program time is very critical and essential for these types of industries. Business Process Reengineering is an effective approach which can be used to reduce time through many techniques and tools like: flowcharting, creative process redesign, process visualization, and process Benchmarking and simulation. In this research, the maintenance program in the Tobruk petroleum refinery has been studied and analyzed. Reengineering of the maintenance program is done using process mapping and Business Process Reengineering tools like flowcharting, and creative process redesign. The flowcharts of the maintenance activities of the Towers and heater in Tobruk petroleum refinery have shown that there are some activities done in series while the maintenance process could be redesigned by doing the activities in a parallel way and some of the activities are combined together. Consequently, the maintenance program time has been decreased from 29 days to 27 days, which leads to an increase in the productivity of approximately (US $3,200,000 every 2 years) to the Tobruk petroleum refinery.