Client Challenge/Overview

Yara pursues a strategy of sustainable value growth, promoting climate-friendly and high-yielding crop nutrition solutions for the world’s farming community and food industry. Yara operates several ammonia plants and other sites for producing urea, nitric acid, nitrates, NPKs and phosphate which provide the foundation for their fertilizer and industrial solutions.

Yara’s production focus is on driving safe performance, optimized production costs, reliability and quality delivered through a culture of continuous productivity improvement across all their sites. Yara was looking to upgrade their technology stack to a more modern application that could integrate with their ERP system to drive data quality and consistency improvements and enhance knowledge exchange for better decision making.

With operational risks changing every day, specifically they wanted to further improve asset integrity by optimizing and automating resource-heavy tasks, such as data entry of turnaround inspection results for evergreening purposes, which would have a material impact on their bottom-line.

Background

Historically, facility inspections for static equipment had mostly been driven by authority requirements. After implementing an RBI solution, Yara was able to identify that less than 5% of components were contributing to 95% of their cumulative risk. This enabled them to focus inspection on assets with high and medium-high probability of failure and avoid safety consequences and economic losses, for example:

• Deterioration condition of a reformer outlet header was detected and fixed before failure could occur
• With UT TOFD inspection, the on-going Hydrogen Assisted Cracking (HAC) was identified before failure
• Avoided a potential failure with very high toxic COF and medium economical COF

However in an environment of continuous improvement, Yara was looking to further enhance their capabilities and decision making.

“With the RBI solution, Yara was able to identify that less than 5% of components were contributing to 95% of their cumulative risk.“

The Solution

The solution was to migrate to our new APM platform, AllAssets. AllAssets enables Yara to quickly determine trendable damage and deterioration mechanisms that could affect asset function. This gives them a deeper knowledge of the real condition of their equipment and enables the creation of a risk driven mitigation plan, including ‘what if’ scenarios for future operations. A library of tried and tested risk models for static equipment embedded with more than 25,000 inspection rules enables Yara to define possible failure mechanisms with short- and long-term corrosion rate calculations and identify cumulative risks of ageing equipment. This means they can quickly prioritize operational inspection work and focus inspection resources. AllAssets also allows for connection and interface integration to multiple SAP systems so Yara could significantly improve the utilization and quality of their data in relation to turnarounds.

Our approach

Our team created a strategy to drive the greatest benefits for Yara that centered around a close collaborative relationship. This meant we were able to build in functions that yielded a better solution for Yara including visualization of their data in a way that could be easily communicated to peers and management and a Data Upload tool that greatly reduced the time they spent entering inspection reports. Furthermore, special equipment in their facility was configured using the Model Builder tool, which enabled them to create a digital twin representing the equipment and its unique characteristics to improve planning and risk analysis. We were able to understand Yara’s pain points and current process and together come up with improvement opportunities for Yara’s sites around the world.

The Results

Our team created a strategy to drive the greatest benefits for Yara that centered around a close collaborative relationship. This meant we were able to build in functions that yielded a better solution for Yara including visualization of their data in a way that could be easily communicated to peers and management and a Data Upload tool that greatly reduced the time they spent entering inspection reports. Furthermore, special equipment in their facility was configured using the Model Builder tool, which enabled them to create a digital twin representing the equipment and its unique characteristics to improve planning and risk analysis. We were able to understand Yara’s pain points and current process and together come up with improvement opportunities for Yara’s sites around the world.