HOVENSA, located on St. Croix, is one of the largest and most modern oil refineries in the world.

HOVENSA is among the largest and most modern oil refineries in the world. Located on the south shore of St. Croix, the facility has a refining capability of 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day. An internal feasibility study was conducted in 2004 in response to business units that manage large volumes of documentation and records. As a result, the study identified nearly three million paper documents stored in 30 files rooms and an additional 500,000 electronic documents on a variety of file servers throughout the refinery.

Efforts to locate and retrieve documents at that time were time-consuming and frustrating. According to Marc Hulsman, supervisor of CAD services and document control in the company’s project management and execution department, when someone needed a document, it was standard procedure for them to drive to a different location to search through a file cabinet. Sometimes they found what they were looking for and sometimes not. Corporate knowledge was getting lost, multiple versions of documents were stored in various locations, and there was not have a system-wide paper workflow approval process.

The result of the feasibility study prompted Hulsman and his team to work with a consultant to research software products that would suit their document management requirements. They narrowed their search to Open Text’s LiveLink document management software. It offers life cycle management for any type of electronic document and is a single repository for storing and
organizing electronic document.

They also selected Information Graphics’ Brava viewer for viewing, printing, and annotating documents, images, and CAD drawing files within and across the organization. Brava can open more than 300 different file formats. Hulsman said HOVENSA end users use a variety of applications.

“The fact that Brava can open so many formats using a single tool was important to our organization.”

Hulsman and his team created a file structure so that document searches and retrievals are easy. They can also search drawing versions for comparison studies. They can also search drawing versions for comparison studies. “We can call up two versions of a CAD drawing and, using Brava, see the changes that were made — items deleted appear in red and items added appear in green. We’ve never had that ability before,” Hulsman says.

Document retrieval time
Hulsman and his team deployed LiveLink and Brava throughout the organization. Since going live, they have loaded more than 2,014,000 documents.  Based on permissions, all of the documentation is available to anyone through their desktop anywhere at HOVENSA.

The company is using E-forms and workflows that have shortened cycle times and improved controls. HOVENSA is more than 40 years old and many of the early documents were deteriorating. Now that they have all been scanned, the quality of the originals is much improved. Hulsman says that was important because many of those older drawing are still referred to today.