1. Background
The site is a long-established petrochemical production facility in South Texas. For decades, the site has produced essential chemical intermediates for a wide range of industrial customers. Its assets are technically complex, highly utilized, and, in some areas, significantly aged.
For many years, the site’s performance was largely sustained by the experience, commitment, and operational discipline of its local teams. Production, maintenance, and engineering worked closely together to keep the assets running reliably.
At the same time, pressure on the site continued to increase. Over many years, only limited investments had been made in the existing asset base. The number of unplanned disruptions increased, availability came under growing pressure, and the maintenance budget had nearly doubled within two fiscal years.
The leadership team was therefore facing a fundamental challenge: How can maintenance and asset performance be sustainably improved without relying solely on more budget, more people, or additional external support?
2. Key Challenges
Before the implementation of vysr, the site was strongly shaped by operational firefighting. Many decisions were made reactively, under significant time pressure, and based on short-term urgency. While the organization had deep experience, it lacked a consistent, data-driven decision-making foundation. Typical challenges included:
- a high number of unplanned asset outages
- sharply increasing maintenance costs
- frequent short-term break-in work
- recurring failures on critical assets
- unclear priorities between production and maintenance
- budget discussions with limited connection to performance
- limited transparency on the largest economic sources of loss
A particularly critical issue was that many problems were known within the organization, but they were not systematically translated into financial impact. As a result, there was no shared view of which actions would create the greatest economic effect.
Production, maintenance, and management often looked at the same challenges from different perspectives.This led to improvement initiatives being launched, but not always focused on the areas with the greatest performance leverage.
The real challenge was therefore not purely technical. The site did not simply have a cost problem.Above all, the site had a prioritization and decision-making problem.
3. Performance Analysis with VYSR
The site management team made a deliberate decision not to start with a traditional external opportunityassessment. Instead, the goal was to use the existing data foundation toidentify performance gaps in a systematic, fact-based, and value-oriented way.
With VYSR, the site’s performance was analyzed along relevant value drivers. The objective was not tocreate another report or dashboard. The objective was to derive concretedecision and action recommendations from existing data.
Using VYSR, the local project team analyzed, among other areas:
- production losses caused by unplanned downtime and their financial impact
- maintenance costs by cost type and root cause
- the ratio of planned to unplanned work
- break-in work and its impact on weekly scheduling
- causes of recurring failures on critical assets
- optimization potential in budget allocation
- gaps in strategic asset management
- value-relevant action fields for a performance roadmap
The analysis showed not only where performance was being lost, but also which decisions and priorities were contributing to those losses.
Only a few hours after the site data had been uploaded, the first analysis results were available. The team then spent two weeks discussing and verifying the findings together and placing them into the operational context of the site.
Based on this process, the action fields proposed by vysr were validated, adjusted, prioritized, and translated into an executable roadmap.
4. Results
After eight months, the site achieved a clear performance impact. The decisive factor was not one single measure, but the combination of data-based transparency, clear prioritization, and disciplined execution by the local team. The key results included:
- 53% reduction in unplanned break-in work
- USD 24 million in avoided profit margin losses due to fewer asset outages
- USD 7 million reduction in ineffective maintenance costs
- USD 2.7 million in targeted additional investment in condition-based maintenance
- 33% cost reduction in cleaning shutdowns
- 17 additional production days through shorter cleaning shutdowns
Beyond the measurable financial impact, the way teams collaborated at the site also changed.Discussions between production, maintenance, and management became more fact-based, more focused, and more clearly linked to the economic contribution of asset performance.
Conclusion
This use case shows how a highly reactive site can gradually develop into a data-driven high-performance organization.
vysr helped the local team translate existing data into clear priorities, concrete actions, and measurable results. As a result, operational firefighting was turned into a structured performance improvement process.
Following the successful pilot, the customer decided to roll out the VYSR Performance Mining Platform across additional production sites.
