An Efficiency Improvement Program to the Automation Department’s Working Practices

Abstract

This thesis focuses on proposing an efficiency improvement program concerning the Automation Department’s working practices. The working practices of the Automation Department have a major impact on the oil refinery’s total competitiveness. Accordingly, the working practices of the Automation Department needed to be developed as a part of a refinery-wide efficiency program.

This study was conducted in a several phases in order to identify the efficiency 'killers' in the Automation Department's current working practices and to propose improvements to fixing these identified pain points. The key concepts behind the work efficiency helped to create a tool, which was used in practice to identify the efficiency 'killers' from the current working practices. After the efficiency 'killers' were identified, the focus area of this thesis was chosen. Best available practices concerning cross-team collaboration were used to tackle the business challenge of this thesis and finally, the improvement proposal was co-created and validated by the relevant stakeholders involved in this study. The improvement proposal combines all the stages presented in this study into a compact and practical solution in order to improve the working practices in the Automation Department and to improve the overall competitiveness of the case company.

The efficiency 'killers' identified from the current working practices were strongly related to interfaces between the production line teams and the historical evolution of the current working practices. In order to control the evolution of working practices and to improve the overall work efficiency in the Automation department, an efficiency improvement program toward cross-team collaboration was produced as a final proposal of this thesis.