Saras Digitizes Oil Refinery Maintenance, Enhances Worker Safety and Productivity
While they expertly deliver innovation and quality to their customers, Callaway Golf’s previous planning and reporting tool wasn’t making the cut. To evolve their enterprise, the sports giant decided to replace their outdated planning software with SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.
Together with Avvale, Callaway Golf successfully implemented SAP Analytics Cloud across their global enterprise in just 6 months. Now, Callaway Golf has a single, consolidated planning solution that has enabled streamlined expense and asset plans so they can focus on what they do best– revolutionizing the sporting world with cutting edge equipment.
As one of the largest refineries in the Mediterranean Sea, Saras holds about 300,000 barrels per day of refining capacity in addition to one of the largest liquid fuel gasification plants in the world. Additional activities of Saras include trading, marketing, generation of electricity from renewable sources, and industrial engineering services for the oil sector.
The Challenge
Saras Digital is a company-wide digitization project started by Saras and their IT engineering team, Sartec. They began this project to boost their field workers’ productivity and increase safety on oil refinery maintenance tasks by introducing mobile applications into their day-to-day routine. In the downstream production world, mobile applications are rare due to two governing issues: The lack of network connectivity in locations where the mobile applications are needed, and, the requirement of safety certified, high-security devices that are approved by a governing body.
For these reasons, many oil refinery operations and other downstream product operations are not able to implement mobility into their processes, leaving field workers to perform nearly all tasks manually.
The Approach
Saras partnered with Avvale to achieve their worker safety and productivity improvement goals while addressing the traditional challenges of downstream production operations. They adopted two basic mobility applications: Switchgear Assistant and Checklist Companion. Switchgear Assistant is a simple application that enhances safety on the industrial shop floor by automating the process of turning off power when a pump needs maintenance. The application works by scanning a QR code that triggers a workflow, which includes user authentication, pump identification, and pump status checks.
Checklist Companion is another application that enhances safety and efficiency for field workers in the refinery by supporting routine data collection on machinery and equipment. The application digitizes the data collection process by having workers scan the QR code on the machine before performing a maintenance check. This allows them to input data for the specific machine, which is immediately available to the control room. Workers can also view the maintenance record of the machine by scanning the QR code. Furthermore, even if workers are not connected to a network, they can continue to the next piece of machinery, knowing that the data is saved in a queue and will be automatically submitted to the control room as soon as network connection is regained.
The Challenge
Before integrating SAP Analytics Cloud, Callaway Golf's planning landscape centered around SAP's legacy planning solution, Business Planning and Simulation (BPS). While BPS met Callaway Golf's planning needs for many years, the enterprise began to experience limitations with their old solution:
- Disconnected plans across the board: As Callaway Golf expanded and acquired new brands, planning processes greatly differed across the enterprise with some business units using Excel spreadsheets and others using legacy solutions for planning.
- Outdated planning functionalities: The existing legacy planning solution lacked many modern functionalities. Among them, salary calculations and asset depreciation automation needed improvement. As a result, it became difficult to create detailed and accurate forecasts across the globe.
- Significant IT support: The legacy solution required continuous management from IT to maintain runtime. IT had to carve out a full day every week to manually maintain the solution.
- No single source of truth: Various departments and brands used different data sources, which led to data silos across the organization, making it difficult to gain a clear picture of the enterprise's planned expenses.
- Rigid user interface: Legacy forecasting system was difficult to navigate and lacked working functions and calculations across the board, such as planning on depreciation and existing assets, adding vendors or members on the fly, and breaking down their cost center expense planning forecasts.
The Approach
With Avvale experts on their side, Callaway Golf laid out the following goals for their new planning landscape with SAP Analytics Cloud:
- Crowdsource and consolidate plans across the enterprise to gain a global overview of their planned expenses and expand the input capabilities to each responsible owner.
- Leverage elevated planning functionalities to create faster and more accurate forecast cost center expense and asset reports. The ability to customize calculations enhances and automates the reporting metrics.
- Harness the power of self-service analytics to alleviate IT from the burden of simple maintenance and data entry requests, so they can focus on high-ROI tasks.
- Maximize user-driven admin capabilities to control the management of calculations and forms.
- Create new KPls driven by the business needs.
When SEM-BPS was the center of Callaway Golf's planning landscape, flexibility was a huge factor that was missing. SAP Analytics Cloud contains powerful scenario planning capabilities that help organizations quickly uncover actionable insights to make data-driven decisions. For Callaway Golf, SAP Analytics Cloud's modern planning functionalities provided users with the ability to:
- Add members on the fly
- Plan on existing as well as planned assets and automatically calculate the depreciation of values
- Test "what-if" scenarios for deeper analysis by creating private versions of plans
- Customize the solution based on their current business process
- Perform driver-based calculations
- Empower users to execute end-to-end planning scenarios, without the help of IT
The Impact
After launching Switchgear Assistant and Checklist Companion, Saras experienced an increase in worker productivity due to reduced working hours on manual tasks and improved worker safety standards. Saras has immediately started the process to roll out the Switchgear Assistant and Checklist Companion applications to their entire plant network.
