Financial Planning of Maintenance Services for Atmospheric Hydrocarbon Filled Tanks

Abstract

Resource scheduling, particularly when applied to hydrocarbon filled atmospheric tanks, challenges planning professionals. When presented with new projects, it is important to maintain the new costs coherent and in line with the company's past portfolio. An ill formed financial schedule leads to problems within contracts as well as in the company's regular activities. Although sometimes it is not as easily perceived as operational losses, one can easily see that such wrong predictions invariably lead to incorrect resource allocation leading to financial misuse of the company's funds. Such concern is notably true for the Brazilian petroleum industry, especially within the transport sector. The sheer size of the projects and the assets involved – mainly due to the country’s continental territory - make any deviation of critical importance. Therefore, to establish a solid methodology in order to obtain parameters and foreseen the resource expenditure as well as operational impacts would be of great value for companies trying to assess opportunities, targets, resource allocation and return rates. Throughout the current research, the authors assessed over thirty physical-financial project plans from a well-known Brazilian pipeline company. From this bulk of projects schedules, twenty were further selected for a more detailed analysis based on similarities - among them - in complexity and investment sizes. The projects were then normalized according to their total capital and time expenditure. The resulting normalized project schedules provided the basis for the methodology presented through the text. The resulting methodology, presented in this paper, aims at assisting planning professionals to infer future financial needs to new projects, as long as similarities constraints are respected. The technique is able to provide data to engineers, planning professionals and managers make a more informed decision. Furthermore, the methodology demands that the resulting database must be updated as new projects are included in the company's portfolio. The database should acquire a Bayesian character in order to provide actual information.