Customer Value Case · Refining

The Numbers MRP Executes On

How a multi-refinery fuels producer built an MRO case its CFO could audit line by line, grounded in its own reported inventory figures, not vendor estimates.

Fuels refinery operations and turnaround planning
Base NumberAuditedBuilt on the company's own reported inventory line
Reduction Target~10%Vs. 30–45% non-moving benchmarks
Recurring Benefit~30%/yrAs a share of the one-time release
Downtime Cost$500K+/hrPublished cost of unplanned refinery downtime
Acerca del cliente

A turnaround-intensive estate, running SAP well, on parameters nobody has time to revisit

Industria
Downstream energy, fuels refining, North America
Alcance
Multiple complex refineries, each its own storeroom
Solución
MRO360
ERP
SAP, with no migration required
Turnaround Balance
Nine-figure, capitalised
Capital Framework
Shareholder returns consume ~half of free cash flow

A North American fuels refiner operating multiple complex refineries across several states, each with its own storeroom, its own material master records, its own reorder parameters, and its own institutional knowledge of which parts matter.

A turnaround-intensive estate, a disciplined shareholder-return framework, and portfolio actions ahead that will split systems and item masters. Like most refiners, its recent operating history includes publicly reported unplanned events, a reminder of what is always at stake in an industry that logs unplanned incidents in the public record most years.

MRO360 was proposed as a governed intelligence layer on the operator's existing SAP landscape, nine interconnected agents reading extracts continuously and writing approved values back into the same SAP fields the planners already use. No migration, no new system of record, no change to how SAP operates. Every write-back requires explicit human approval and carries its derivation.

All customer figures in this case study are expressed as ratios to protect confidentiality. The base of the case is the repair-and-maintenance-supplies inventory line in the operator's own audited filings, a figure its finance team could verify independently.

El desafío

SAP executes faithfully, but nothing computes the numbers

This operator runs SAP, and runs it well. The problem was never what SAP does, it is what SAP MRP was never designed to do. MRP calculates replenishment from consumption history, lead time, and a service level a planner typed in. Nothing in that model reads equipment criticality, redundancy, failure consequence, RCA findings, or supplier reliability.

  • Criticality is an input, never an output: a person typed it once, and nothing re-examines it as the asset ages, so a six-year-old insurance spare can be indistinguishable from dead stock.
  • Service level is a number a human types, anywhere between 60% and 99.9%, and that single keystroke separates a stocked critical spare from a stockout.
  • Auto-recalculation covers only part of the estate: on manual reorder-point and standard MRP types, safety stock is informational and never recalculated, so parameters drift silently.
  • Each plant is a silo: surplus at one refinery is invisible to a planner facing a shortage at another, so an external emergency purchase order gets raised at a 3 to 5× premium while the part sits on a shelf elsewhere in the network.
Full Business Case

Get the complete CFO-auditable breakdown

The download covers all six modules, the reasoning behind the reduction target, and why the base number came from the operator's own filings rather than a vendor estimate.

  • The four structural boundaries SAP MRP was never designed to compute, and the module behind each fix
  • How the ~10% reduction target was set deliberately below 30–45% published benchmarks
  • Why the repair clock, not the inventory line, is the larger prize, and why it stayed out of the headline case

Descargar el caso práctico

Descubre toda la historia que hay detrás de la transformación.

Sus datos se utilizan únicamente para encauzar esta conversación. Consulte nuestro Política de privacidad .

Resultados

What the business case delivered

Every assumption was set deliberately below published benchmarks, and the base number came from the operator's own audited filings.

MétricaResultado
One-time working capital releaseEight-figure, at a ~10% reduction target against 30–45% benchmarks
Recurring benefit~30% of the release, every year
Carrying-cost saving~22% per year on capital freed
Costes de inactividad$500,000+ per hour, published industry benchmark
Missing-spare share of downtime23% of unplanned downtime, published benchmark
Downside caseStill decisively positive at half the assumed capture

Avoided downtime was deliberately excluded from the headline case and positioned as upside, to be measured against the operator's own downtime records rather than promised in advance.

Lo que aprenderás

Inside the full business case

  • Cómo Puntuación de criticidad replaced a manually typed flag that never got re-examined with a value re-scored continuously from maintenance history, MTBF/MTBR, redundancy and RCA findings.
  • Cómo Dynamic Reorder Point extended recalculation to the manual-reorder-point and standard MRP materials that automatic reorder-point planning never touched.
  • Cómo Previsión de la demanda separated planned, corrective, shutdown and emergency demand, forecasting each up to two years out so long-lead turnaround spares are staged in time.
  • How Cross-Enterprise Transfer Intelligence matched a shortage at one refinery against dead stock, excess and open purchase orders at another before any external order was raised.
  • Cómo Obsolescence Check flagged manufacturer-discontinued parts early, with qualified substitutes, vendors and landed cost attached as a ready decision.
  • Cómo Work Order Planning ranked upcoming work by parts risk and supplier reliability, so planners worked a queue instead of firefighting jobs about to slip.
A quién va dirigido

Built for the teams who keep a turnaround-intensive estate right

VP Reliability & Turnaround Planning

Accountable for a nine-figure capitalised turnaround balance and long-lead spares staged years ahead.

Responsables de mantenimiento, reparación y operaciones (MRO) y de compras

Closing the plant-by-plant silo that sends emergency orders past parts already sitting on a shelf elsewhere.

Finance & Investor Relations Leaders

Needing a base number the CFO's office can verify independently, not a vendor estimate.

SAP & IT Leaders

Running MRP well, but needing a computation layer rather than a replacement, through an ECC-to-S/4HANA transition.

Get a free spare parts maturity assessment, run on your own filings.

If your MRP runs on parameters last reviewed years ago, or your refineries buy externally what the network already holds, the same case can be built on your own filings and a single SAP extract, in weeks.

Customer identity, locations, site count, and absolute figures have been withheld or expressed as ratios at the customer's request.
Sus datos están seguros y se utilizan exclusivamente para los fines previstos. Damos prioridad a su privacidad y protegemos su información.