Management plan for effective maintenance of petroleum tanks in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This research" Management Plan for Effective Maintenance of Petroleum Tanks” was focused on refinery tank farm which is the largest oil product store in Sri Lanka. The refinery is operated as a heart of Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) which carries on business as a main importer, exporter, seller, supplier and distributor of Petroleum products in Sri Lanka. Storage plays very important role in the refinery so that it directly related to refinery operation an whole business of CPC. As per the observations, the refinery tank maintenance management system is currently facing many problems leading to ineffectiveness in maintenance management system as whole. The effort of this research is to address those problems via proposing best fit effective maintenance management system in order to overcome prevailing issues in refinery tank farm and bring the CPC to a profitable way. This research was based on Mix method approach which consists of quantitative and qualitative methods. In the first phase of this research, it was carried out wide data survey and questionnaire data collection in order to find out prevailing maintenance management issues and barriers within refinery tank farm. Semi structured expert interview was conducted as the second phase of this study base on the findings of first phase. The expert’s proposals and opinions were subjected to a detail content analysis in order to develop strategies and solutions for management plan of petroleum tank maintenance. This study revealed that refinery tank maintenance system has faced to a critical management failure in several aspects and it is required to have solution no more later. Finally, It was proposes a total management solution for those issues. It is strongly believed that the finding of this research will address those issues effectively while achieving the utmost goal of the researcher as well.