COVER STORY 2

CONNECTIONS 5

CUSTOMER SOLUTIONS 6

Flow Solutions DivisionBW Seals

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VOL. 13, NO. 4

When David Gautreaux, Maintenance Manager atMarathon Ashland Petroleum’s (MAP) TexasRefining Division in Texas City, Texas, promised work-ers a steak dinner if the plant reached its goal for

reducing pump failures, he reckoned he’d have until sometime in2002 to make good on the offer. Instead, he ended up hosting aTexas barbecue late last October, nearly two-and-a-half years aheadof schedule.

MAP Texas City set out in February 1998 to improve the Mean-Time-Between-Failure (MTBF) of its 386 mechanically sealed pumps from

2 www.flowserve.com Face to Face

cover story

Marathon Ashland Petroleum, LLC, (MAP) began a program to reduce pump failures in its seven

refineries starting with MAP’s Louisiana Refining Divisionin Garyville, Louisiana, in January 1997. Working closelywith Flowserve, MAP set a goal of increasing the MeanTime Between Failure (MTBF) of its mechanically sealedpumps from about 24 months to 58 months over a periodof five years. The company also set intermediate goals foreach of the five years.

MAP’s Texas Refining Division in Texas City, Texas,

began their program in February 1998 but fell short of itsintermediate goal of 34 months. This was because it meas-ured MTBF on a 12-month rolling average, so 1998 figuresincluded data that predated the start of the program andwould not realize the improvements made until the fol-lowing year. There was also a significant amount of timespent on administrative issues with the program, deter-mining the “bad actors” list, and increasing the awarenessof the program. As a result, only about 20 percent of its386 units were upgraded during 1998.

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24 months to 58 months by 2003. BySeptember 2000, the average MTBFstood at more than 63 months, wellahead of the five-year goal, andGautreaux owed a lot of people dinner.The quick results were due to a potentcombination of management backing,training, cooperation between opera-tions and maintenance staff, and supportfrom Flowserve’s QRC Facility in DeerPark, Texas.

“We were having repeated failures andsome very poor performers,” recallsKenny Spriggs, Rotating EquipmentEngineer at the Texas City refinery. “Wewere working on eight pumps a week; itwas just really absurd. We saw the needto improve the reliability of our pumps,and recognized the economic advan-tages in becoming an industry leader.We started doing some pump retrofits—basically, changing the bearing hous-ings, stiffening up the shafts, changingthe mechanical seals to newer technol-ogy, and utilizing Life Cycle CostAnalysis to justify each upgrade.”

Need for allianceThose efforts helped, but the resultswere spotty, and their MaintenanceDepartment knew it could use somehelp. Earlier, Flowserve’s Seal Grouphad negotiated an Alliance Programwith MAP corporate, but the deal leftparticipation up to the individualrefineries, according to Flowserve On-Site Application Engineer for much ofthe Texas City project—Tim Schewe. Inearly 1998, Jay Brister, TechnicalSupport Supervisor at the TexasRefining Division (TRD), and his asso-ciates decided it was time to buy intothe Flowserve program.

The first step was to form whatFlowserve calls an “Alliance ImprovementTeam,” a committee of MAP employeesand Flowserve representatives that meeton a regular basis to drive the program.The team began by developing perform-ance improvement strategies and bench-marks to measure their success. A keymeasurement was a 12-month rollingaverage of MTBF, and the team set annualgoals for that figure, topping off at 58months five years from the starting date.

The team decided to pull pumpsfrom service and refurbish them only asthey failed, and in the first year, Spriggsestimates, about 20 percent of themwere upgraded. “The number was fairlysmall,” he says, “but we concentrated onthe bad actors. The changes rangedfrom a mechanical seal upgrade tomore costly changes, such as bearinghousing retrofits.”

Seeing resultsDealing with the bad actors, the pumpswith the worst histories of failure, pro-vided a fairly quick boost in averageMTBF. Between January and Decemberof 1999, the rolling average rose bynearly 82 percent since 1998 data wasfactored into the 12-month average. Bythe end of the year, it was roughly dou-ble what it had been when the programbegan.

Concentrating on pumps with thepoorest performance history raisesMTBF quickly, but without a systematicapproach to maintenance, the num-bers were hard to sustain and evenharder to improve. To keep the num-bers rising, the refinery upgraded itsmechanical seal selection, improvedrepair practices, launched a regular

Face to Face www.flowserve.com 3

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S tarting in late 1998 and continuingthrough 1999, average MTBF rose

steadily, as the results of the previous year’sefforts bore fruit and still more pumps wererefurbished. By August, the refinery had sur-passed its goal for the year of 42 months, onaverage, between failures, and just twomonths later, it overtook its 2000 target of 49months. In fact, December’s figure was overthe 54-month target for 2001.

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T he average MTBF curve flattenedslightly in 2000, as the more dra-

matic opportunities for improvementdiminished. Nevertheless, MTBF con-tinued to rise, and by June, the refineryhad crossed its 2002 goal of 58months. By October, the curve hadrisen to more than 63 months—animprovement of nearly 150 percent injust two-and-a-half years.

2 0 0 1 and beyond...

Rotating Equipment Engineer Kenny Spriggs says the Texas City refinery, with

Flowserve’s assistance, is putting together aprogram to raise MTBF still higher. The nexttarget: 72 months—six full years. “There’s stilla lot we can do,” he says. Future efforts willtarget a better utilization of refinery resourcesby further defining roles in the preventive main-tenance process, evaluating existing practices,and expanding root cause failure analysis.

training program, and involvedOperations personnel in a pumpinspection and preventive maintenanceeffort aimed at catching problemsbefore they shut equipment down.

“The main thing we did was go backto the basics in our repair practices,”Spriggs says. “If you don’t have anythingto follow, you’re probably not going tocheck everything. So we developed apump repair form that has every possi-ble check you could imagine. Anotherthing we did was to convince ourOperations Department to let us havethe equipment for more than just oneor two days. Previously, if we pulled apump out in the morning, they wantedit back that afternoon.”

Taking pumps offline doesn’t com-promise production in most servicessince the refinery’s pumps are typicallydeployed in pairs. This gives the main-tenance staff the time it needs to do athorough inspection and a qualityrepair job, or even send the pump to anoutside shop for repair. “We had pumpsrunning 12 months between failureswhen they could have been running fiveyears—just because the head-to-case fitwas loose or it had a loose bearing fit,”said Spriggs.

Staying on trackProcess operators meet once a monthto review performance and discussprojects for the coming month. MAP-TRD Operations Manager, BillKepner, let Spriggs and Schewe use aportion of the meetings to present

brief training sessions aimed at spot-ting problems before they becomecritical. “We’re teaching them theproper procedures for turning on apump and shutting it down,” Spriggssays. “We train them in hydraulics—how pumps work. We’ve talked aboutcavitation, about pump operation,about running in parallel and inseries. It’s all aimed at giving theequipment owners, the operatingdepartments, a better understandingof what they need to do to receive themaximum run time on pumps.”

Spriggs gives a lot of credit to MAPmanagement, and especially DavidGautreaux, for supporting theimprovement program by encouragingdepartments to work together andspending the dollars needed to makethe program work. And the investmentis paying off. At the refinery’s celebra-tion held last October to recognize theachievement, Division Manager RichBedell told personnel that the TexasCity refinery has realized a reliabilitysavings of nearly $600K during the firstthree years of the program. Spriggscredits Flowserve for much of the pro-gram’s success. “The Flowserve pro-gram has been a tremendous benefitfor us,” he says. “We’re saving muchmore than the cost of the program,and they’ve got Dennis Gardner, aFlowserve on-site Sales Engineer, hereto provide us with technical directionbasically at all times.”

Schewe notes that the quick improve-ment in MTBF at the refinery is fairlyexceptional. “When people ask me,‘Why were you guys so successful?,’ I tellthem that the main reason is that wehave a good, committed relationshipbetween Marathon and Flowserve,” hesays. “Many times in this business, cor-porate will approve a program but endusers will resist it, so you end up fight-ing a battle within a battle. We didn’thave those problems. We all workedtogether, and that’s probably the mainreason we succeeded.”

Now that the refinery has met andexceeded its goal, they are now movingthe bar even higher. “We’re putting aplan together now on how we think wecan get to 72 months,” Spriggs says. “Wemade some tremendous strides that wedidn’t think we were going to be able tomake, and we blew right past the goalsfor the first five years.” ●

4 www.flowserve.com Face to Face

The Marathon/Flowswerve team celebrates success. Left to right,

Marathon's Kenny Spriggs and Jay Brister showcase the company's

MTBF results with Flowserve employees Dennis Gardner, Tim Schewe

and Alton Smith.

cover story

DuPont Dow Elastomers, a joint ventureformed in April 1996 between the DowChemical Company and The DuPontCompany, is a global supplier of spe-

cialty elastomers and supporting technologies.The DuPont Dow offerings range from ther-

moset rubber polymers to thermoplastic elas-tomers to high-performance fluoroelastomers,plus perfluoroelastomer parts with tempera-ture and chemical resistance. Kalrez perfluoro-elastomer parts and Viton fluoroelastomersfrom DuPont Dow greatly extend the capability

of traditional elastomers by providing a broadrange of performance and value in harshchemical processing environments.

KalrezFor more than 25 years, Kalrez, available onlyfrom DuPont Dow Elastomers, has been used indemanding applications to achieve the highestlevel of sealing performance and increaseMTBR. Kalrez withstands more than 1,800aggressive chemicals while offering the hightemperature stability of PTFE (316˚ C).Compounds have been designed for specificapplications to help maintain seal integrity,reduce maintenance and operating costs, andimprove safety in chemical processing, oil andgas recovery, aerospace and petroleum applica-tions. Kalrez parts are manufactured in ISO andAS 9000 registered facilities and are available asstandard O-rings or custom shapes. For assis-tance in compound selection, seal design orfailure analysis, Kalrez application engineersare readily available.

VitonIntroduced more than 40 years ago, Viton wasthe first commercial fluoroelastomer. It’s speci-fied for its outstanding resistance to heat, fluids

and compression set.Unfortunately, there aremany low-cost fluoro-elastomer “imposters”putting operating sys-tems at risk of seal fail-ure. To avoid gettingan unknown or “alle-ged equivalent,” and toensure seal performanceto meet your specifications,DuPont Dow initiated the gen-uine Viton program. Only parts made with 100-percent virgin Viton fluoroelastomer as the soleelastomeric component can be labeled with theDuPont Dow seal. These parts are manufac-tured and distributed in accordance with strictguidelines established by DuPont DowElastomers, the only manufacturer of Vitonfluoroelastomer.

Chemical processors who need further infor-mation regarding chemical compatibility of elas-tomers, including Kalrez and Viton, should referto The DuPont Dow Elastomers Chemical ResistanceGuide, which is found at http://www.dupont-dow.com/crg. The Chemical Resistance Guide isa user-friendly, online elastomer-evaluation toolthat provides specific elastomer performance inselect chemicals. For more information aboutDuPont Dow products, including Kalrez andViton, visit http://www.dupont-dow.com or call800-853-5515. ●

Face to Face www.flowserve.com 5

DuPont Dow Elastomershelps solve sealing problemsKalrez® and Viton® are the two leading materials

connections

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www.dupont-dow.com/crg

BP’s Carson, Calif. refinery processes265,000 barrels of fuel products a day,and is the one of the largest in the Los

Angeles basin. Some 1,400 centrifugal pumpskeep product and raw materials moving throughthe refinery. Many of the pumps are deployed inredundant pairs, so pump failures rarelythreaten production. But failures are neverthe-less expensive—typically it costs around $5,000to fix a single pump, says machinery engineerSteve Konig. About half that amount goestoward mechanical seal replacements; the rest islabor cost to isolate, repair and reinstall thefaulty unit.

Konig and his colleagues reasoned that thebest way to keep repair costs low was to preventbreakdowns from happening in the first place.The company spotted a second opportunity toreduce costs by cutting its inventory of mechani-cal seals. Lack of standardization had led to aproliferation of parts, and contributed to highMRO costs. “We recognized that if we concen-trated on those two areas, BP would be ahead, sothat’s where we decided to focus our efforts,”Konig says.

The refinery was already a Flowserve customer,with close to $1 million worth of Flowserve sealsin its parts inventory. Working locally with seniorsales engineer Jeff Butler, BP Carson entered intoan alliance with Flowserve in 1999, and the twocompanies began to explore specific savings tar-gets and ways the refinery could hit them.

Charting successTogether, Butler and BP Carson managersdeveloped four key performance indicators—deliverables that would chart the effectivenessof the alliance. First was to increase mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) for mechanical sealsby 45 percent over three years. Second was tocut BP’s mechanical seals inventory. Third wasto provide additional training for BP Carsonmechanics and operators. And fourth was toprovide timely delivery of seals and repair parts.

To set a performance baseline, Flowserve sur-veyed the 1,400 pumps, fed the data into a pro-prietary database called SIS (Seal InformationSystem) and began generating monthly reportson MTBF for each pump. Maintaining the accu-racy of the database is no trivial task. When workstarted, BP Carson’s own historical repairrecords were not especially reliable. “Carson is a75-year-old refinery,” comments Konig. “Manymodifications have been made over the courseof time that have been documented in varyinglevels of detail.”

Each month, Butler reviews the SIS reportswith BP Carson to make sure the numbers areaccurate. The information fed into Flowserve’sSIS comes from work orders generated by BPCarson’s computers. Misclassification of failuresand ordinary clerical mistakes—duplicate workorders, for example—can throw the MTBF fig-

6 www.flowserve.com Face to Face

customersolutions

ures off, he says, and defeat the whole purposeof the record-keeping exercise, so making surethe figures are correct is important.

Apart from charting Flowserve’s performance,the MTBF numbers also help BP Carson identifywhat Konig calls the company’s “bad actors”—the pumps that fail frequently—and focus extraeffort on resolving the root-cause of the recur-rent failure.

The benefits of trainingOften, Konig notes, poor performance is notonly limited to misapplication or poor design,but to improper operation and installation. Andthat’s where training becomes important. “If wecan educate our operators so they can catchproblems before a pump fails catastrophically,we can switch to the spare pump and scheduleour work execution better,” Konig says.“Ultimately, we want to uncover problems andresolve them before they lead to pump failure.Again, the cost saving comes from not having topull the pump.”

Flowserve operates separate training pro-grams for BP Carson’s maintenance personneland operators. Maintenance people learn howmechanical seals work, what some of the criticalspecifications are, how to troubleshoot, and howto repair and reassemble the equipment.Operators learn how to spot problems thatmight lead to future pump failure. Butler leadsmost of the training, but BP Carson is also send-ing some of its people to Flowserve’s trainingcenter at its headquarters in Irving, Texas for in-depth courses.

Often, notes Butler, early seal failure is a symp-tom of other problems—the wrong seal for anapplication, for example, or bad piping configu-ration. Misapplied seals, he says, are sometimesthe result of inconsistent purchasing and lack ofstandardization. In BP Carson’s case, Flowservematched its specifications to the refinery’s appli-cations and drew up a list of standards for sealuse. Apart from solving the misapplication prob-lem, standardization also meant a smaller inven-tory of seals and repair parts at BP Carson.

In addition, Butler went into the field, exam-ined each “bad-actor”pump and came back withrecommendations for low-cost piping and oper-ations changes that would prolong seal life.

Cost-effective recycling Flowserve keeps BP Carson’s inventory costsdown by warehousing replacement seals andrepair parts for the refinery. As used seals areremoved at the refinery, they’re returned toFlowserve. Flowserve refurbishes the seals andkeeps them in its inventory. When the refineryneeds replacements, the refurnished seals areshipped from Flowserve, which guarantees aminimum delivery time. Except for a small num-ber of emergency units, BP Carson holds noFlowserve inventory, and this has cut its overall

inventory investment significantly.There are other advantages that come with

reducing inventories, says BP Carson materialssupervisor William Rosborough. “We save on thecost of capital by not tying money up in inven-tory. We also don’t have to pay taxes on inven-tory we don’t own. We don’t have inventory thatsits on the shelves and becomes obsoletebecause it runs out of useful life for whateverreason.” There are other savings, too. By consol-idating most of its mechanical seal business withFlowserve, the refinery cuts fewer purchaseorders and processes fewer invoices.

Although much of the relationship betweenBP Carson and Flowserve is contractual, whatmakes it succeed is Flowserve’s unwritten com-mitment of support—Rosborough calls it thespirit of the alliance. “We know that sinceFlowserve is the preferred supplier under thisagreement, it will go to extremes to support us,”he says. “They go the extra distance to supportthe agreement. It also has to be a win-win situa-tion, so we try to do things that will benefitFlowserve. It’s a close interrelationship, ratherthan just a business deal.”

Onsite supportAmong the extras are Butler’s services. Konigreckons the Flowserve representative spendsabout half his time at the BP refinery, providingengineering support, making sure the mechani-cal seals are being applied correctly, examiningprocesses to ensure that they’re not contributingto seal failures and coordinating parts turn-around between BP Carson and Flowserve’swarehouse. “You can’t put a price on that dailyinteraction and the value that affords us,” saysRosborough.

Just 18 months into the alliance, BP Carson isalready surpassing some of the goals it hadexpected to achieve in three years. Instead ofreducing MTBF by the originally targeted 45percent, the actual figure currently is close to95 percent. Inventory levels are down by$400,000 and Konig puts the total saving gen-erated by the alliance so far at about $700,000.Much of that, he notes, are recurringeconomies that will save the refinery mainte-nance dollars for years to come.

“The Flowserve Seal alliance has allowed BP'sCarson refinery to remove costly inventory fromour warehouse shelves with a high degree ofcertainty that Flowserve will provide us with aseal when we need it,” says Konig. This, coupledwith active measures to increase the refinery'sMTBF (seal inventory surveys, bad actor lists,engineering design audits, training, etc.), hasresulted in a demonstrable benefit to BPCarson's bottom line.”

Adds Butler, “I think it’s been a good experi-ence. I think we both profit from it. And I thinkthere’s a lot more we can do over there.” ●

Face to Face www.flowserve.com 7

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