HMEL Adopts Analytics to Improve Efficiency

HMEL, a joint venture between Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (HPCL) and Mittal Energy Investment, Singapore, boasts of a world-class refinery, GGSR, which incorporates the latest technologies. The refinery has high Nelson Complexity Index which will enable in maximizing value added products even from heavy/sour crudes.

HMEL has built the 9 MMTPA (million metric tonne per annum) Guru Gobind Singh Refinery in Bathinda, Punjab. The first oil and gas project to be set up in the state of Punjab, the refinery produces petroleum products complying with Euro IV emission norms, with a capability of processing 180,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

While the petroleum company has put itself into a forward-looking mode, information technology is in the core to assist its management in taking decisions in the interest of the business. While enterprise-grade applications such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and MES (manufacturing execution system) have been in place for a long time, the company was eager to bring in real-time visibility into the company's core functioning. It wanted that its management is able to take timely decisions on the live data.

FORWARD-LOOKING ANALYTICS

"HMEL wanted to create dashboards for the top management that helped them take forward-looking decisions. The key was to update those dashboards with real-time information from all departments," says Harak C Banthia, Chief Financial Officer, HMEL.

HMEL started working on integrating all apps and adopted a new IBM analytics-based solution to transform how the company manages its financial and operations data to boost business performance.

HMEL had earlier engaged IBM as its strategic partner for the design and implementation of manufacturing execution systems (MES) including the selection of the select processes and applications, as well as managing the mechanics of the program.

The new IBM solution integrates information from the various components of the MES, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and control systems within the refinery and delivers a consolidated, single view of the data. The new technology enables HMEL to analyze key corporate business processes including, planned versus actual investments, production, key performance indicators, among others. The system will generate near real-time information for HMEL business executives to make more intelligent decisions around optimizing productivity and margins.

"As a green-field project, we wanted to leverage the best of technology to enhance our operational capability and efficiency. We needed a solution that would provide us with a centralized view of all our assets for operational management purposes. IBM's framework, built for our industry addressed our requirement effectively with significant plant performance and productivity," further adds Banthia.

IBM has been working alongside HMEL as part of Project Prism, the umbrella program to implement strategic applications for HMEL, to support the ERP system, manage master data (MDM), build key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards, and create an integration business application environment. The Cognos Business Intelligence solution helps HMEL in building an enterprise-class performance management platform closely aligned with their existing technical architecture.

PROCESS OPERATIONS

The IBM analytics solution not only delivers the ability to access data consistently, but also equips the organization with power to interpret, transform, and derive process operation actions from the information. It provides an industry standard-based information model and associated integration techniques, enabling HMEL to turn data into information that can be accessed and delivered through web services.

According to the information shared by IBM, HMEL is one of the five refineries in the world to commence integrated operations from day one.
The company further wants to extend the dashboard capability to level 3 so that the benefits could be extracted by multiple people at management positions.