Description of the Site: The Chalmette refinery, situated on the Mississippi River on the outskirts of New Orleans, processes 175,000 bbls/day of crude oil.

Nature of the Opportunity: Chalmette had a need to improve reliability, to assure they could make their production plan. As a smaller refinery with some difficult demographics, the refinery's viability depended on consistency in production levels.

Because of their understanding of the Beaumont project, Chalmette was excited about getting similar results, capitalizing on the development work already completed.

What We Did: Our initial work included developing a working team to participate and guide the project, and develop a scope of work. This project segment moved into development phase to systematize the process, quantify the benefits available, develop a detailed workplan, and pilot the process in a refinery unit.

The pilot immediately identified sources of potential downtime, and developed plans to remediate the risk. The value of the benefits were identified to be over $20,000,000 per year.

Following the pilot SAMI staff guided the Mobil Chalmette team to start implementation, at which time the Mobil team felt they had sufficient direction to work without additional help.

Results: More than $20 million of production improvements were implemented early in this process. Defining and implementing improvements became a part of the local culture. In fact we received excellent support by the unions involved, because it added to the value that each hourly worker added to the company.