ABSTRACT This paper describes work undertaken to raise awareness of maintaining the integrity of offshore plant and pipelines by the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) in corrosion management activities. This provides a method of monitoring and improving the performance of corrosion management activities within the Oil and Gas industry and provides an enabler for cost improvement. The performance indicators have been developed as a simple and demonstrable method of measuring the cost of corrosion, the performance and effectiveness of corrosion inhibition and provide a metric for the reliability of corrosion inhibition equipment.
INTRODUCTION Key drivers for improved corrosion management are accurate and concise reporting of corrosion performance together with the provision of management information in readily interpretable terms. Achieving these aims can contribute significantly to the overall objectives of improving, safeguarding and maintaining plant integrity as well as significantly improving cost performance.
There is a ready tendency for the reporting of corrosion information to overly concentrate on the technical performance of the facilities, i.e., much reliance is placed on providing technical data citing corrosion rates and displaying corrosion trends. Whilst this is important to corrosion professionals it can be relatively meaningless to those with overall management responsibility for the particular asset in question. It is therefore incumbent on corrosion engineers to interpret and communicate the effectiveness of corrosion mitigation practices in a way that is not only understandable by the non technical specialist, but also in a way that conveys performance or indeed change in performance. What constitutes acceptable performance however may well vary from asset to asset or company to company. This paper concentrates on a number of metrics that can be used to measure corrosion management performance and how these factors can be interpreted.
KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATOR'S (KeI's)
The importance of meaningful management information is often highlighted when operational problems arise, however, it is much more useful to know beforehand what detrimental processes are relevant in a given production operation and hence be in control of that process. It is therefore fundamental to the assessment of the long term value of the production facilities that there is an understanding of the technical threats posed to them. In many cases corrosion is high on the priority of these threats. It is therefore important to understand from a business case point of view how much in integrity and financial terms do these threats pose. Understanding the threat / cost relationship can then be used to plan or assist in maintaining the safety, integrity and profitability of the asset.
Typically management information is required on the predicted costs of the problem, the risks involved, the remaining life of the affected equipment and what can be done to improve or eradicate the problem. The KPI's described below were developed specifically to measure the effect of corrosion on the technical and financial performance of the assets involved and to address the performance of particular critical corrosion related systems, however the same methodology could be applied to other systems. The three KPI's developed were:
· Cost of corrosion.
· Corrosion inhibition level.
· Equipment maintenance completed.
Cost of Corrosion KPI
The cost of corrosion KPI was developed to convert the amount of corrosion damage sustained during a given monitoring period to a monetary figure which provides clearer focus on corrosion management performance. Factors consid