DATA MANAGEMENT: PETROCHEMICALS
‘Already there has been a notable increase
in revenues generated by the improved productivity and quality of the products,’ Gonzalez says. ‘The use of an enterprise- wide LIMS solution has helped Pemex to improve product quality and accelerate time-to-market at a lower cost by converting raw data into real-time knowledge for fast, timely and fact-based business decisions.’ Pemex PGBP is also running a centralised Thermo Scientific Atlas CDS over its nine gas processing facilities. Saudi Aramco, a petroleum company operating from Saudi Arabia, has also implemented a centralised LIMS platform, in this case from LabWare, at its refinery and gas plant laboratories. According to Muhammad Shahid, engineering specialist at Saudi Aramco, prior to deploying a centralised LIMS, all plant labs had their own LIMS systems with different database format. In addition, database engines were a mix of Microsoft Windows and non- Windows operating systems. ‘The cost of its maintenance and support was very high,’ he says. By deploying LabWare as a centralised LIMS, one database applicable for all the labs could be set up and product certificates could be produced in one format, resulting in a reduction in maintenance and support costs for the system.
Interfacing systems Both Pemex and Saudi Aramco required integration of LIMS with plant information systems and ERP. At Saudi Aramco, the LIMS is an integral part of DSS (Decision Support Systems), for aiding the decision- making process. LIMS, for instance, has an interface to the data historian platform, which provides data for calculating key performance indicators (KPIs) – indices
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specified to monitor the current performance of the plant and schedule future planning. Pemex integrated its LIMS with its ERP
system (SAP) and PIMS (OSI PI). ‘As soon as test results were entered and authorised in the LIMS by the laboratory staff, the information could be available immediately for the technicians and other personnel in the processing facilities, as well as Pemex’s headquarters and laboratory administrators,’ explains Gonzalez. Pemex also wanted to implement a system that would enforce GMP and GLP parameters and specifications for certification of its products.
‘Through this work, Ecopetrol is mapping the value of all its oil fields and incidentally, because it is a nationalised company, the value of the oil fields owned by the Colombian government’
While LIMS is still vital for many petrochemical refineries, there are other options for production plants. Tom Curtis, vice president of product innovation at data management software vendor Labtronics, comments that a number of its customers are interested in integrating instruments directly to SAP QM (Quality Management), a module of SAP that uses quality data from the laboratory to create quality certificates and make decisions regarding product releases. In this setup, the use of LIMS would be bypassed entirely, although in production facilities with fully integrated LIMS and SAP platforms, the necessity to go down this route is less.
‘Traditionally, a LIMS would interface ➤
with instruments but there may have been a gap between the LIMS and SAP,’ says Curtis. ‘From our experience, more petrochemical refineries are relying on SAP and feeding the instrument data directly into this enterprise resource planning software.’ Labtronics’ LimsLink can be used to capture the incoming data stream from instruments, query SAP for any required inspection lot information, and then post the information directly into SAP QM. ‘One of the concerns with connecting laboratory instruments to SAP has been that there is often laboratory-specific functionality that is difficult to implement into the ERP platform,’ explains Steve Bolton, marketing specialist at Labtronics. SAP often requires a distillation or summary of the results – an average across the lot or a combination of various data. An intermediary system like LimsLink is ideal for those calculations. LimsLink has the functionality to carry out calculations automatically, limit checking, and analytical operations. This laboratory- based functionality helps to bridge the gap between the laboratory requirements and the inherent capabilities in SAP. ‘To us, integration of an instrument to SAP really is no different to integration of an instrument to a LIMS,’ Bolton continues.
Petrochemical R&D Along with its refineries, Ecopetrol also runs a research centre conducting pilot plant processes as well as geo-exploration R&D involving analysing geological core samples. LabVantage’s LIMS is used in the research laboratories. The geo-exploration lab carries out geological investigations using test-well samples from prospective boreholes. The sample data is analysed and
SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2010 9
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