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COPYRIGHT 2008 Advantage Business Media
Abstract
Once considered advantageous for only the largest enterprises around the globe, a fully comprehensive Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) has today become a standard shopping item for companies in the petroleum industry. In this article we discuss a large, ambitious project in Brazil and highlight developments in some other parts of the world. The message from each of these regions is that using the right LIMS is essential for the maximization of efficiency, and therefore profitability, of manufacturing and monitoring processes.
Brazil
With an area of 8,514,877 km2 (3,287,597 sq. miles) and an estimated population of 190 million people, Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world in both area and population.
Petrobras supplies almost the entire demand of the Brazilian market for petroleum and its by-products with 16 refineries, capable of producing 2,114 thousand bpd, three fertilizer plants, a total pipeline extension of 30,343 km, terminals, bases and 51 tanker ships (self-owned fleet).
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The LIMS project involves 11 refineries, 2 fertilizer plants and a shale extraction plant all of which communicate via the Web with the LIMS which is hosted on a central database in Sao Paulo. Early on in the project it was decided to fast track the implementation for Transpetro, the Petrobras subsidiary responsible for the pipelines and terminals as well as the shipping, in order to integrate their quality data into Petrobras' corporate database BDEMQ (Movement, Storage and Quality Database). 25 Transpetro laboratories are now online via Citrix, also hosted in Sao Paulo.
Between them, the laboratories test an extremely wide variety of products and all of the product specifications, analysis definitions and measurement units are maintained in BDEMQ. The quality results are also stored here and the LIMS therefore maintains a bi-directional interface with BDEMQ to synchronize the two systems. This large multisite implementation is considered to be easily the largest LIMS in place in South America.
This large multi-site implementation is considered to be easily the largest LIMS in place in South America.
An important consideration when migrating from the previous LIMS was to...
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