Nexus Develops Procurement Strategy to Support Critical Turnarounds

Nexus implemented a successful procurement strategy and built a support team to prepare a major Midwest refinery for several critical turnarounds.

Overview

The Nexus team has a long-standing relationship with a major refinery in the Midwest, supporting everything from front end assessments to construction planning and commissioning. A key part of maintaining and growing this relationship was to support the client in new areas.

Like many other operators in this space, this client was forced to reduce its internal procurement support during the pandemic as many planned projects were delayed or cancelled. As the client began returning to normal operations post pandemic, it realized the staffing level of its current procurement team would not be sufficient to execute its planned project workload. It also had several critical turnarounds on the horizon.

To support its client, Nexus needed to grow its procurement team and expand the company’s capabilities to meet the needs of this and many other clients.

Challenge

The client was concerned about its ability to complete the procurement workload associated with the upcoming turnaround using just its own team. The size of the team had been greatly reduced during the pandemic. The amount of work it takes to prepare for the turnaround can be significant and things have the potential to slip through the cracks.

Procurement can be a very long and lengthy process where it is necessary to interface with many different resources including the client’s team, technical stakeholders, and suppliers. With so many different parties involved, confusion and disorganization are not uncommon. Unfortunately, this can lead to supply chain issues which negatively impact the safety, quality, schedule, and cost of turnarounds.

Solution

The first step was for Nexus to expand its own procurement team and capabilities. The firm hired a tenured procurement professional who built an internal team and who also placed team members at the client site.

The team was tasked with finding potential gaps in the procurement processes and then developing solutions to remedy the gaps. The team then looked at what was needed for the upcoming turnaround, took a step-by-step approach to outline project deliverables and define roles and responsibilities, and then created a strategy for execution that would ensure that everything ran smoothly, on time, and within budget.

As a result of the initial success of this program, more procurement support was requested by the refinery. This refinery is now well-prepared heading into their turnarounds and is eager for continued support moving forward.

Client Name 

Confidential

Location 

Midwest USA

Industry

Refining

Procurement

Services  

• Procurement Planning
• Gap Analysis
• RFP Evaluation
• Contract Management