feeding back to corporate planning groups. Refiners can then produce products and move them into the right places at the right time to meet market demand, using the most efficient transport methods, while also informing production teams what needs to be produced.
Driving agility The creation of a shared model forms an effective platform for enhanced collaboration to ensure the supply chain organisation achieves greater operational agility. This agility has often been equated with responsiveness - the ability of the organisation to react quickly to external events. While speed of response is essential, business alignment is also of paramount importance. True agility is about all of the core constituents of the organisation being fully aligned, effectively working in unison to a common goal and acting according to the most accurate and up-to-date information available. Of course, before an organisation can get everyone moving in the right direction, it has to have broad agreement on its direction and take a holistic approach. The goal should never be just about maximising the profitability of the logistics group. After all, the logistics team may need on occasions to incur significant expense carrying out an activity that helps save money for the overall business. The key is moving away from the ‘local optimum’ and focusing instead on the ‘global optimum’. Again, communication and collaboration is an important element of the strategy for this ‘holy grail’ of operational alignment. This collaborative approach can also be extended to customers. Organisations could, for example, look at actively or passively sharing information with a
customer to change order patterns or better scheduling of arrivals to avoid creating shocks in the supply chain.
Driving efficiencies and profits Real-time agility is essential as organisations need to be able to monitor and track progress towards achieving the plan and adjust where necessary to ensure the business remains on target. Those that manage to achieve enhanced collaboration stand to reap significant rewards. The potential prize can be tens of millions of dollars per year depending on the scale of the company. The bigger the company - the bigger the benefit. In broad terms, there are three dimensions to consider. The first is having a complete view of those collaborating across the refinery network from refining to logistics, sales and marketing. The second is achieving real-time control through the timeline of planning through scheduling to operations. The third is being able to capture what has been identified from better planning across the company and use the acquired information to pinpoint opportunities to make more money. For companies to achieve this, it is critical that they address issues from internal organisational changes, as well as driving towards more demand-driven marketoriented methods.
Understanding risk Equipping staff with leading-edge software helps to provide the appropriate tools to maximise skills and overcome critical obstacles within the operation. Better alignment of processes and equipment from the plant floor through
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