"WinBLISS has been the best laboratory data and workload management system this refinery has ever used.”
- Ayda Nalband-Bashian, LIMS Administrator/Chemist
BP is a global company based in London with nineteen refineries globally. BP’s Carson refinery, which is located in Los Angeles, produces 250,000 barrels per day of products, including gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, and propane. It adopted BLISS in 1998 after completing a four-year evaluation process of various LIMS applications.
In 1995, before deploying BLISS, the Carson refinery began experiencing problems when their network load increased. Processes running off of a remote mainframe were subject to significant performance problems, impairing productivity. The protocol for improving performance included taking down the mainframe every day at midnight for three hours, making it unavailable to laboratory personnel and other users. Since the Carson lab is a 24/7 operation, this resulted in significant downtime during these hours.
Moving from one platform to another can be very difficult, but the implementation of BLISS went very smoothly for BP. Baytek International™ consultants worked in cooperation with BP personnel to ensure the ease of deployment. After the rollout, there was tremendous acceptance of BLISS by users. Employees appreciated the user-friendly qualities of BLISS, and BP saw immediate improvements in reliability, performance, data availability, and database maintenance. Today, the Carson refinery takes full advantage of BLISS by using eighty to ninety percent of the product features day to day. Ad-hoc and scheduled sample logging, printing of sample labels, building ad-hoc queries, and completion of COAs are just a few of the many functions BLISS manages within the laboratory.
While the benefits of BLISS in the laboratory were immediately recognized, it quickly became evident that BLISS was indispensable to personnel outside the lab as well. Data is now exported to groups such as the process control group and console operators, both of whom need information from the lab frequently throughout the day. Using the Excel® Add-In tool, process engineers can now bring in both lab and process data for daily analysis and merge it into a common Excel® workbook. And easy access to data for head operators and foremen means more effective control in unit operations. The BLISS program also provides simple tools so those outside the lab can carry out tasks that only lab personnel could carry out before, such as the printing of sample labels.