“The computer interface capability of BLISS has saved us half a man-day every day just in the area of copying and distributing sample reports all over the plant.”
- Glenn Bollman, Superintendent of Laboratory and Quality Management
Lyondell-Citgo, a joint venture between Lyondell Petrochemicals and Citgo, is a major producer of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Shortly after the company was formed, officials realized there was a serious problem. The plant was operating on an antiquated image database that was projected to crash in Y2K. Lyondell-Citgo responded by seeking a new LIMS to replace the old system.
Initially, a competitor of Baytek International™ was chosen as the new LIMS provider, but their LIMS system was still under development and there were issues with change control. When the company attempted to fix problems that arose, the fix often caused problems in other areas of the program. Ultimately, the installation failed and Lyondell-Citgo abandoned the product entirely.
After consulting several other refineries, including Citgo’s Lake Charles and Corpus Christi refineries, they made a decision to go with Baytek International. Baytek made a commitment from the start to have a fully tested version of the software completed before anything was deployed. Once deployed, BLISS dramatically improved the productivity of lab technicians as they went about their daily tasks. The engineers had the tools to get data directly from the laboratory for the first time, preventing them from having to seek out data from the lab or transcribe numbers from hard copy reports. Lyondell-Citgo also was able to customize reports from different user groups so decision makers could view critical information electronically each morning when they arrived.
One of the BLISS functions Lyondell-Citgo has found most helpful in recent years is interfacing Microsoft™ Excel to BLISS through the “Export to Excel” feature. Users can now perform database queries against Baytek International supported tables in the database. They can then put the results of those queries directly into data modeling.
Another function of BLISS that has been instrumental to Lyondell-Citgo’s processing system involves sample tracking. Lyondell-Citgo has satellite printers dedicated solely for the purpose of printing sample labels. BLISS creates all the samples ahead of time and prints SampleID numbers and barcodes on the labels. Users then use the Sample Arrival application to barcode the samples into the lab and capture the times they were brought into the building. It took some customization on Baytek’s part to create this capability but now Lyondell-Citgo can custom build the format for their sample tags and put SampleIDs on them as well.