Piloting Valero with Real-Time Management
If you haven’t heard of Valero, don’t worry. It’s largely unknown to the public although investors recognize it as one of the largest oil refiners in the United States. Valero Energy is a top-fifty Fortune 500 company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, with annual revenues of $70 billion. Valero owns 16 refineries in the United States, Canada, and Aruba that produce gasoline, distillates, jet fuel, asphalt, petrochemicals, and other refined products. The company also owns 10 ethanol plants located in the Midwest with a combined ethanol production capacity of about 1.1 billion gallons per year.
In 2008, Valero’s chief operating officer (COO) called for the development of a Refining Dashboard that could display real-time data related to plant and equipment reliability, inventory management, safety, and energy consumption. Using a series of monitors on the walls of the headquarters operations center room, with a huge central monitor screen showing a live display of the company’s Refining Dashboard, the COO and other plant managers can review the performance of the firm’s 16 major refineries in the United States and Canada.
The COO and his team review the performance of reach refinery in terms of how each plant is performing compared to the production plan of the firm. For any deviation from plan, up or down, the plant manager is expected to provide the group an explanation, and a description of corrective actions. The headquarters group can drill down from executive level to refinery level and individual System operator level displays of performance.
Valero's Refining Dashboard has been so successful that the firm is developing separate dashboards that show detailed statistics on power consumption for each unit of the fum, and each plant. Using the shared data, managers will be able to share best practices with one