The project team in the corporate headquarters was designing a new refinery to be located in the Far-East. They were working with a European design contractor in the latter's offices.

The refinery required steam and electricity for its operations. The unreliability of the local electricity company in the host country meant that the designers had to install a captive power plant 70 MW in size, along with a receiving station. The designers envisaged a combined cycle power plant to meet these demands efficiently. The facilities were estimated to cost about US$100m. As part of our maintenance and reliability team remit, we sought to influence project designers to build reliable and lean plants. It was best to do this at the front end of the project, and we convinced the project manager to invest US$30000 in mathematical modeling. We expected that by optimizing the configuration, we could reduce capital costs, as well as operating and maintenance costs over the life of the plant.