SNAPSHOT
Customer: Big West OilIndustry: Petroleum Refining Region: Salt Lake City, Utah, United StatesUse cases: BLISS LIMS, BLISS SQC+, Laboratory Efficiency, Data Quality Management
About Big West Oil
Big West Oil is a 35,000-barrel-a-day petroleum refinery operating in the Salt Lake Valley. The operation runs 24 hours a day, processing intermediate distillates and finished products across a continuous production cycle.
Datacor sat down with Jeremy Lloyd, Chemist and QC Specialist, who works with his lab team in the BLISS LIMS system, runs the QC program for all lab instruments, sets up test profiles, quality controls, and spec limits, and oversees instrument maintenance and procurement. It is a role that touches nearly every part of the lab operation.
The Challenge
With a 24-hour lab and a refinery that never stops, Big West Oil needed reliable, real-time data visibility across the entire operation. Before their current system was fully in place, getting data to the right people meant relying on manual processes and a single point of expertise. Trending data required going through the one person who knew the spreadsheets. There was no automated way to alert the team when something went wrong overnight.
For a production lab testing materials between feedstocks, in process and finished products, that gap carries risk throughout all parts of operations and product release. When intermediate results fall outside of spec or typical values, operators need to act quickly to avoid impact to downstream units and finished product quality. The refinery needed a system that could deliver data fast, alert the right people immediately, and give everyone from lab techs to unit operators and management a shared, accurate view of what was happening on the floor.
The Solution
Big West Oil has been running Datacor BLISS LIMS for approximately ten years and upgraded to BLISS SQC+ in 2022.
"Implementing SQC+ was a game changer for our QC program. The new charting and kiosks in the program are great."
Today, BLISS LIMS and SQC+ serve the entire refinery. Results from instrument-connected tests are immediately transferred to the supervisor for review, transferred to data historian, and available for immediate decision-making. Every role in the refinery has read access to data, with permission levels controlling who can modify it.
Jeremy and key decision-makers start each day with the kiosk, which surfaces anything out of spec or out of control immediately. Overnight, the notifications keep him connected from home. "We have notifications set up through the system, so I'll get an email. A lot of times, I can handle that from home with a phone call, but I know if I'm walking into instruments being down or failing spec on certain products. I get notifications when I need them at the time it happens. That lets us be proactive with our approach, it lets us plan our day a little better."
LIMS dashboards, trend lines, and customizable reports give management and unit operators direct access to the data they need without going through the lab. When something is out of compliance on an SQC sample, lab comments are visible to everyone. Engineers can run ad hoc queries, export to Excel, or pull up result histories directly in BLISS. Scoreboards give unit operators a simplified interface suited to their workflow. SQC+ also handles the complexity of petroleum test methods, which require calculations that go well beyond straightforward math.
"Confidence in the data and data quality has just improved overall." - Jeremy Lloyd, Lab Chemist / QC Specialist, Big West Oil
The Results
The impact at Big West Oil shows up across efficiency, data quality, cross-functional visibility, and the bottom line.
BLISS allowed Jeremy to minimize the time needed for ensuring data quality, allowing him to work on more impactful work with lab staff and key analyzers, improving the quality management system, and taking on LIMS system administrator functions from the lab manager.
Transparency has also changed how the lab interacts with the broader operation. Management and unit operators are able to see lab comments, trend lines, and result histories on their own, which has built confidence in the data across the organization and reduced back-and-forth between the lab and the rest of the refinery.
For a production environment where out-of-spec results on intermediate products can cascade into costly downstream issues, the speed of data and notifications has direct operational value. When finished products come back off-spec, the team can isolate the blend, rework it, and resample before release. That ability to act quickly, backed by data the whole team trusts, is central to how Big West Oil manages quality.
The result is a tighter, more efficient operation. When the lab trusts its data, the refinery can optimize how it runs and manage product quality with greater precision. For Big West Oil, that confidence in data translates directly into measurable financial value.
"It's really improved our ability to enhance our data quality across the board. It really tracks every aspect of our lab, our testing capability."
- Jeremy Lloyd, Lab Chemist / QC Specialist, Big West Oil
The Partnership
After ten years, the relationship with Datacor extends well beyond the software. Jeremy describes Datacor as responsive and accessible in a way that stands out among the vendors he works with. In an industry where most vendor relationships happen through a queue of emails, Datacor still picks up the phone.
When industry changes, regulatory updates, or test method revisions come through, Jeremy said Datacor proactively communicates what is changing and how they are addressing it through their QC mentorship program. Rather than leaving customers to figure out the implications on their own, Datacor keeps users informed and walks them through what comes next.
For Jeremy, that support is personal. When he hits a wall on something in the system, his Datacor rep is a phone call away. Whether the question is straightforward or complex, the answer comes quickly and without friction. That kind of accessibility builds users' confidence to use the system to its full potential, and it is the kind of partnership that keeps a customer coming back for a decade.
Schedule a free consultation with Datacor BLISS Laboratory experts today.
