PETRONAS is an industry leader in oil and gas, which ranks among the FORTUNE Global 500 largest corporations in the world. With headquarters based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, PETRONAS has business interests in 35 countries.
PETRONAS owes much of their success to their careful balance between both state-owned as well as being a full-fledged commercial organization. In total, PETRONAS Group is comprised of 103 entirely owned subsidies, 19 partly owned outfits as well as 57 associated companies.
The key aspects of PETRONAS’s business are as follows: exploration and production, gas and power, downstream (both oil and petrochemicals), technology and engineering, and logistics and maritime.
PETRONAS engage in locating, exploring and producing oil and gas reservoirs through the medium of their exploration and production subsidiary, PETRONAS Carigali Sdn Bhd. Their oil business consists of marketing, refining, trading and retail operations.
PETRONAS’s gas business activities cover the entire process from the examination and manufacture of natural gas to gas handling and liquefaction, trading and marketing, gas transmission pipeline operations, gas district cooling, liquefied natural gas shipping and regasification and supply of industrial utilities.
PETRONAS Lubricants Italy is PETRONAS’s Italian subsidiary, which was created in 2008 thanks to the union between FL Selenia and PETRONAS’s Lubricant Unit. As a Fluid Technology Solutions company, their resolution is to provide the world with the best lubricants and functional fluids. With a mission to reinforce their position as the favorite partner of worldwide OEMs in developing next generation vehicles, they seek to build their brand globally as well as establishing a strong association with reliability, quality, and technology.RONAS Lubricants, based in Villastellone, Italy, began searching for a laboratory information management system (LIMS) in early 2012. PETRONAS needed a LIMS which would be suitably able to address their various and divergent needs. The requirements included a reliable and stable repository which would be able to track analyses (internal and experimental samples and benchmark study for competitors), secure current and backdated information, measure key performance indicators and share data internally.
A further stipulation of PETRONAS’s requirements was a system which would adhere to the ISO 17025 standard, a feature that is highly requested to fully track samples and consumables. Lastly, PETRONAS Lubricants needed a system which would assist them in monitoring and tracking each sample using audit and electronic signature.
System Selected
After considering multiple vendors of LIMS, PETRONAS Lubricants selected LabVantage thanks to their strong Italian presence and their international reputation amongst similar companies. A further reason for PETRONAS’s selection of LabVantage was teh LabVantage LIMS platform, which permits the user to configure the system themselves and avoid heavy customizations. The advantages of a highly configurable solution are numerous, and include: easier implementation, cost-effectiveness per hour of configuring over customization, and a lower overall cost of ownership in the code.
System Delivered
Thanks to LabVantage LIMS flexibility, LabVantage was able to go live with 90% of PETRONAS’s requirements through configuration rather than customization. The Chief Information Officer of PETRONAS Lubricants Italy, Carlo Guidotti, commented, “The application is robust, flexible, and complete; it allowed us to obtain what we needed with very few customizations. The technology behind the LIMS is also state of the art.”
The system was able to be entirely implemented in under a year, thanks to the configurable nature of LABVANTAGE. This is due to the minimal documentation to create for development and testing of the configuration-based changes in direct comparison to systems requiring heavy customization.
Guidotti continued, “LabVantage LIMS is definitely a successful solution for PETRONAS Lubricants Italy. It met all of our requirements,”
Indeed, PETRONAS plans to continue their usage of LabVantage LIMS to their other global sites. In the future, plans include linked instruments such as ICP, MECOIL and viscosimeter and PETRONAS will go live in the research and development department, in addition to a department related to metal working fluids.
This information has been sourced, reviewed and adapted from materials provided by LabVantage Solutions, Inc.
For more information on this source, please visit LabVantage Solutions, Inc.