Supply and demand planning for crude oil procurement in refineries

摘要

The upstream petroleum supply chain is inefficient and uneconomical because of the independence of the four complex and fragmented functions which comprise it. Crude oil exploration, trading, transportation, and refining are functions which may be integrated through unified decision-making facilitated by timely information exchange. This exchange has been problematic because the four business units with their disparate activities have not been able to capture and appropriately structure the required information. How can business executives in the oil industry assemble all of the required information to achieve system-wide optimization? To remove the silos which impede system-wide optimization, there is need to analyze people, systems and issues in the upstream section of the petroleum supply chain; as a background to understanding the current challenges faced in achieving integration. Hence, the use of secondary and primary data sources was used for this research. The secondary includes the review of relevant literature while the primary data were from two sources. The first came from an on-site interview with the heads of business units of a case study, a company which is a major player in the industry.