13 november 2019
KINEF LLC (Kirishinefteorgsintez LLC) is the main supplier of oil products for St. Petersburg, the Leningrad, Novgorod, and Pskov regions; the company is integrated into Surgutneftegaz PJSC. The enterprise carries out a phased upgrade of the plant’s technological scheme and production base. Production is automated today to a level of more than 85%. Of high priority in KINEF LLC’s technological policy is the upgrade of processes and modernization and technical re-equipment of production, while the end goal is to enhance quality of products.
To achieve this goal, KINEF LLC made a decision to automate operations of the mobile service personnel of the Kirishi oil refinery and other enterprises of the holding. The project had to enhance the quality and reliability of equipment inspections, reduce labor costs for conducting inspection in shifts, enhance control over and responsibility of performers and to collect statistical data for analysis, planning, and rate setting.
The hardware/software facility based on the OPTIMUM Smart Engineering Systems 2025 was tested in June 2019. The facility that was provided by the Digital Economy Development Institute (DEDI LLC), was intended, in particular, to automate the inspections of pieces of equipment and technical places in a distributed territory.
Trials of OPTIMUM SES 2025 had to confirm the advantages of implementing a mobile component in the the production management system, namely, to verify that the deployment of the system will provide:
- reliability of data on the condition of equipment under control;
- monitoring of the performance of work by production personnel;
- objective timing of work and operations on equipment;
- end-to-end planning of inspections of equipment.
The OPTIMUM SES 2025 digital platform was tested in Workshop No. 13 on a facility for dehydration and thermal processing of sediments and oil sludge, in real-time 24x7 operation mode. Tanks for oil, solutions, sludge, condensates, air and pumps, mixers, tricanters, decanters, spiral conveyors, which were identified using NFC tags, were inspected on a daily basis.
The test involved the workshop head who briefed operators how to conduct inspections and monitored the fulfillment of the tasks using the OPTIMUM WARM web application (Web Workstation “Manager”). Operators of the production facility and production pumps made a tour along a predetermined route, scanned NFC-tags with tablets, logging in to the equipment under test, and recorded the status of inspections attaching, if necessary, a digital message or a photo of the equipment.
DEDI specialists only needed 10 days to launch pilot operations of the OPTIMUM SES system; this timeline also included training workers in operations with Tab-Ex® 01 tablet computers specially designed for Class 1 explosion-hazardous areas (electrical equipment of groups I and II) and class-21 zones (group III).
The tests confirmed expectations regarding the implementation of the OPTIMUM SES system that allowed the following processes to be automated:
- addition of data to the system from the inspected location;
- monitoring of progress in inspections using NFC tags;
- inclusion of photos and comments into the report on inspection;
- collection of data for analysis and audit of officers’ activities.
- generation of reports and plotting of analytical charts;
- control of inspectors on the route by means of reading NFC tags on the equipment and authorizations to fulfill tasks;
- objective assessment of the condition of the equipment;
- assistance in making managerial decisions and predictive analytics.
The tests conducted have confirmed the efficiency of the mobile inspection automation system on the basis of the OPTIMUM SES 2025 Digital Platform. The software product has been recommended for deployment at KINEF LLC for automation of inspections.
— A. V. KAZAKOV
DEPUTY TECHNICAL DIRECTOR FOR LABOR PROTECTION AND INDUSTRIAL SAFETY, LLC “KINEF”
