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Oct-2009

Romanian refiner adopts electronic learning to raise efficiency

Following Romania’s accession to the EU, a local refiner reassessed its approach to training to ensure a supply of skilled operators

Cristinela Budin, Rompetrol Refinery
Brian Cormier, Resource Development Company
Arun Palit, Solomon Associates

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Article Summary

The Petromidia refinery was built in the mid-1970s and, for part of the time until its acquisition by Rompetrol in 2001, was run as a Romanian state-owned facility. Soon after its acquisition, Rompetrol started a large expansion and modernisation programme. This year, Petromidia celebrates 30 years of crude oil refining.

As Romania moved to an open market economy and the country joined the EU in January 2007, Rompetrol realised that investment in human capital would be necessary to keep the company dynamic, innovative and profitable. However, many hurdles needed to be overcome to achieve this. Money was in short supply and time was of the essence. Also, as a result of past legacy and culture, the refinery operators’ work practices were too narrowly focused and the existing training was equally narrow and inward looking. Skilled operational trainers in Romania were almost non-existent and the majority of operators in the refinery did not speak English, so were unable to take advantage of training programmes available elsewhere.

Rompetrol retained HSB Solomon Associates (Solomon) for advice on improving the organisation’s effectiveness; in particular, upgrading the operators’ competence. Following a review of services offered by international providers, they together chose the learning methodology of Resource Development Company (RDC). After a successful pilot programme, providing 60 operators with 12 courses in four months, a formal operator certification programme was rolled out.

Background
With headquarters in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the Rompetrol Group is a multinational oil company operating in 14 countries, with the majority of its assets and operations in France, Romania, Spain and South East Europe. Rompetrol is active in refining, marketing and trading, with additional operations in exploration and production, drilling, engineering, procurement, construction manage-ment (EPCM), and transportation. Its Petromidia refinery and chemicals complex is located near the city of Constanta on the shores of the Black Sea. Petromidia is a nominal 105 000 b/d (14k T/d) medium-complexity refinery with reforming, catalytic cracking and coking capacity, and an attached petrochemicals complex.

Rompetrol has established itself as a competitive and vertically integrated enterprise. This evolution has brought with it several challenges, one of the foremost for the Petromidia refinery being the evaluation of the viability of the workforce, assessing their existing capabilities and retooling the facility’s training infrastructure. The refinery needed to look for modern technology to maintain a competitive advantage in the region. In addition, Rompetrol wanted to shift the emphasis of its training from exclusively classroom-based to a more flexible learning environment.

Initial assessment
To help the Petromidia refinery establish a long-term strategy, Rompetrol consulted Solomon, which applied its performance improvement process, Net Cash Margin Measure-ment, Management, and Maximisation (NCM3), to Petromidia’s operational and reliability processes, including organisational effectiveness and training. This collaboration began by analysing existing internal training resources, of which there were few. During Petromidia’s history as a nationalised refinery, there was little capital to invest in current technology addressing best practice. Over the years, efforts to find new training resources were inward-facing. This resulted in a static training programme that continually lost its vitality as experienced personnel retired and left the programme depleted of solid, fundamental, technical knowledge to be passed on to an incoming, less experienced workforce. Furthermore, because of each operator’s narrow area of daily responsibilities, even the most experienced and tenured operators needed fundamental process training to be able to expand and maximise their productivity in other process unit areas within the facility.
After this initial assessment, some fundamental changes, to help Petromidia improve its human competency, were recommended to improve operating efficiency:
•  Establish a training group at the refinery within the human resources department, with an overall mandate to improve the technical knowledge and expertise of staff at the site on all aspects of refining operations
•  Collaborate with the corporate training group (at the head office in Bucharest) on training in professional skills and managerial development
•  Staff the refinery training group with several training officers, preferably drawn from experienced operations staff
•  Initiate an operator training and certification programme geared towards safety, environmental compliance and profitability of refinery operations.

Challenges
Solomon and refinery managers determined that an external content provider would be needed for the operator training and certification programme. To be truly effective, a traditional North American or West European approach to training would need to be modified to overcome several challenges, such as:
•  A large number of operators in the refinery did not speak English and only felt comfortable in a Romanian learning environment. A fair number of staff had only a working knowledge of the English language. The technical terms for refining equipment, processes and applications were different in the two languages
•  With Romania now part of the EU, Romanian operational instructors were difficult to find, as many were working in other countries
•  Instructor-led classroom training in English (or another European language) would require a full-time translator during the course, which limited flexibility
•  Due to limits on class size, a repetitive process with a foreign instructor and a translator would add to the cost of training because of travel and per diem expenses. Several dozen courses in this mode would be prohibitively expensive
•  Non-Romanian training classes left only English texts for reference. Copyright issues made translation difficult and time-consuming
•  Labour contracts and other logistical issues made it difficult to schedule a large number of operating staff, who work in shifts, in a classroom working to fixed time slots.


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