Whether your maintenance team need to configure and calibrate valves, predict machinery faults, or repair and replace problematic instrumentation, Emerson Educational Services can create suitable training to assist in attaining your specific goals. Emerson is a learning partner that can provide ongoing competency development to drive safe and efficient operations. To create a competency development program, Emerson follows a proven process that starts with Educational Services consultants working with the management team to identify items such as job-role definitions and skills gap analysis, the appropriate training methods such hands-on practical courses, and methods of assessing the training success.
Working with Emerson to design suitable training was the topic of a presentation within the maintenance and reliability stream of the Emerson Exchange EMEA 2024 conference. Hussain Ali, instrument maintenance engineer at Kuwait Integrated Petroleum Industries Company (KIPIC), described how the company worked with Emerson to design a competency development program for its maintenance engineers. The presentation gave an overview of the program outline, implementation and key lessons learned.
KIPIC is responsible for operating and managing refining, petrochemicals manufacture and liquefied natural gas import facilities. The company’s Al-Zour refinery is the world’s largest, and the liquefied natural gas import facility project is the first of its kind in the State of Kuwait. KIPIC believes its workforce is the key to accomplishing its mission of “making more possible”, not only for the company, but for the entire oil sector. KIPIC is therefore committed to enhancing the skills and competencies of its employees. This includes helping new employees quickly adapt to their work environment, providing hands-on practice with existing equipment and systems at the refinery, and improving teamwork and soft skill competencies. This dedication to competency development is in accordance with KIPIC’s human resources 2035 objectives and strategies for improving the knowledge and capabilities of the company’s professionals.
Supporting this, KIPIC and Emerson collaborated to design, implement and monitor an in-depth five-week competency development program for maintenance engineers. Initially, eight instrumentation and control engineers from the Al-Zour refinery attended the course, receiving a combined 168 hours of training at the Emerson Kuwait campus. This included live demonstrations and practical hands-on sessions. The course focused on troubleshooting, maintenance, configuration and calibration of temperature, pressure and level instrumentation, tank gauging systems, gas analyzers and control valves.
KIPIC maintenance engineers attend the five-week training course at Emerson’s Kuwait campus.
Final testing saw participants achieving an overall 31% increase in their competency scores.
Feedback from the KIPIC maintenance engineers was very positive, although some areas of improvement were identified. KIPIC is planning to train another group of its engineers and will work with Emerson to create an advanced training program to increase the competency of the first batch of engineers. More topics will be covered in the next phases of training, and the competency program will expand into other areas, such as operations and reliability.
