RL Blogs
By Ralph Laurel
Dec 30, 2014I had to guess, I say you’ve been frustrated by a refinery budget or two during your time. |
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Like the one about you having to get 10 (or maybe 20) times the margin dollars back to spend one dollar of expense. “Come again?” or “WTF!” might be a typical reaction from an engineer trying to optimize around profitability for the refinery.
You ever have the discussion about how you’d be willing to spend your own money for that new idea if the company would give you all the profits resulting from that idea? Yeah, I think I’ve been involved in at least 25 of those. I’d say it’s a pretty common occurrence to constantly battle the loathsome budget.
I’m here to tell you that just like most other concepts, the refinery budget just needs to be utilized properly. Here are some key flaws that may be present in how your refinery utilizes a budget.
Budget Development
PROBLEM: Surprise! The budget is based on what you spent in the past or even worse it’s based on some number that a manager dreamed up.
If the budget is not based on any realistic scope of work, it’s hard to make the workload match up to the money spent. That’s when a refinery ends up making some terrible decisions on what to cut. Instead of scrutinizing where the money is being spent in a systematic manner, the focus usually turns to the large dollar items.
SOLUTION: It’s vital to understand the basis and document diligently when developing a budget. The extra effort up front can save lots of time and bad decisions in the future.
Know where the money is supposed to go and also document the justification for spending that money. That way if something needs to be cut during the budget year, you’ll know what is available to be cut and what you’re giving up.
Avoid budgets based on historical spend as you’ll never find opportunities to reduce spend in specific areas to free up money for other areas.
Budget Consistency Across the Refinery
PROBLEM: Typically, the refinery budget is split into various smaller budgets for different divisions and business teams. Each budget is controlled by a different person trying to hit his or her target.
It’s human nature to try to improve your area of responsibility; therefore, people will rarely come in way under budget.If one part of the budget is under-spent, that group will find a way to utilize that money somewhere else. This doesn’t allow for consistency in how the money is spent across the different groups within the refinery.
SOLUTION: From budget development to budget spending, some oversight is needed to make sure that the justification for a dollar spent in one group is similar to that in another group.
If one area of the refinery has some extra money left in their budget at year end, they shouldn’t spend it if another area has a project or activity with greater returns. The only way to ensure consistency is to have some external oversight on where the money is going.
Expense Hurdle Rates
PROBLEM: Many refineries have hurdle rates for spending expense dollars. For instance, an expense dollar shouldn’t be spent on making more margin dollars unless
SOLUTION: Hurdles rates should be utilized to ensure consistency across the refinery. It’s a way to make sure one business team isn’t spending money on 2 to 1 benefit to cost activities while another is cutting activities making 10 to 1 returns.
This goes hand in hand with the previous topic of consistency across the refinery. The hurdle rate should be adjusted to find the right balance of spending on margin improvement, energy efficiency, expense reduction, and safety mitigation activities.
Spend in each of these areas, along with the respective opportunities and risk in these areas, should be revisited periodically to adjust the hurdle rate.
Budget Contingency
PROBLEM: If your refinery budget has a contingency, chances are that if no major events come up requiring the contingency to be spent, it will be held till the end of the year.
budget. Know the amount of time required to implement these items and release contingency ratably over the year. This will prevent the sudden surge in work at the end of the year.
So yes the refinery budget is a pain, but it can be much less painful if it’s utilized the right way. After all, no one can argue that a budget is not necessary. You wouldn’t run your household without a budget or spend without properly scrutinizing the justification… so you can’t blame companies for doing the same. | ||||||
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