The oil sands site of a $15B unconventional oil & gas provider engages in the mining, extraction, and upgrading of bitumen into a synthetic crude oil. The process is capital intensive, and operating costs per barrel can be as much as 10X the cost of conventional drilling, causing an urgent need to reduce the cost per barrel to achieve and maintain competitiveness in the global market.

SSA & Company deployed a cross-site team to conduct an end-to-end analysis of the company’s operations. The data derived from this analysis enabled the team to develop solutions to improve asset reliability and uptime, increase process safety, increase productive use of assets and labor, and reduce waste. SSA & Company helped implement these solutions, resulting in significantly improved client business performance, which led to reducing operating costs and a 17% cost per barrel reduction over a 3-year period. SSA & Company also transferred these skills to the company’s team to ensure the culture of improvement would continue.