Why Materials Matter on an Oil and Gas Site

On an oil and gas site, most material is not bought to be sold. It is bought to keep equipment running: pumps, compressors, valves, instruments, heat exchangers and pipework. This material is called MRO material (maintenance, repair and operations). Managing it well is the job of materials management: deciding what to hold, buying it, receiving it, storing it in good condition, issuing it to the right job, and getting rid of it when it is no longer needed.

The course Supply Chain Management describes the flows of material, information and money across a chain of companies. Here the view is narrower and deeper: one operating asset, such as a gas plant or an offshore platform, and the material that keeps it producing safely.

Materials are part of maintenance and production

A maintenance job needs four things at the same moment: a planned task, a trained person, access to the equipment, and the right material. If the material is missing, the other three are wasted. The technician waits, the permit expires, and the equipment stays out of service.

The link to production is just as direct. When a critical machine fails and its spare part is not on site, the time to get the part is added to the outage. For a compressor that limits the gas a plant can export, each extra day can mean lost production worth far more than the part itself.

The opposite failure is quieter. Many sites hold large stores of parts that are never used, ageing on shelves, tying up money that could be used elsewhere in the business. Good materials management works against both failures at once: not running out of what matters, and not holding what does not.

What this course covers and what it leaves to others

This course covers the categories of MRO material, the material master and cataloguing, spares criticality and the stocking decision, quantities for low-demand spares, insurance spares, pooling, repairables, site stores operations, preservation, offshore and remote logistics in outline, turnaround materials, obsolescence, surplus and disposal, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) for all of it.

General inventory formulas belong to Inventory Optimisation. How the maintenance programme is built belongs to Planned Preventive Maintenance, and failure analysis to Reliability Engineering Fundamentals. Warehouse layout and picking in general belong to Warehouse Operations Management, and contracts with suppliers to Contractor and Supplier Management.