Experiences with oil movements and storage (OM and S) systems within integrated refinery management systems

One of the world leading refiners has been operating the offsites of several of its major refineries for some years with OMS software derived from a custom development by IBM. The degree of integration achieved between offsites operation and refinery scheduling, oil accounting, dispatch and customer order handling has been very considerable. The improvements is offsites operations have manifested themselves in better operation with substantially less crisis management than would be considered normal in less automated offsites operations. Tankage utilisation, ship turnaround and blending throughput have improved both because of the separate effects of better scheduling and better operation and additional to those because of the tight integration between the two. (orig.)