SNAPSHOT
Customer: CITGO Corpus Chriti RefineryIndustry: Oil & Gas Refining Region: Texas Gulf CoastUse cases: Data Automation, Product Release Wrokflow, Interdepartment Connectivity
At a petroleum refinery, a single barrel of product touches nearly every department before it ever leaves the facility. Trading commits it. Operations produces it. The lab certifies it. Logistics moves it. Compliance documents it. Finance accounts for it. Each of those groups has a job to do, and every one of them needs to know what the others are doing.
For most refineries, that coordination has relied on the same tool for decades: emails, printers, phone calls, etc.
It works. But it doesn't scale. And it doesn't leave a record.
Taylor Bloomquist, Hydrocarbon Logistics Manager at CITGO's Corpus Christi Refinery, a 175,000-barrel-per-day operation, sat at the center of this every day. His team is the intermediary between every department that touched a product on its way out the door.
"Within our team, as the intermediary between all the departments, we used to have to manage most of those questions of where is the job at, do I have orders, what are we doing via phone calls. And that's fairly time-consuming and not really auditable. Did you actually have this conversation with somebody or not, as a supervisor, is a challenge point."
This is not a CITGO problem. It is an industry problem. Contracts get sold at a corporate level. Production teams need to act on them. Multiple departments need to verify status. Compliance needs documentation. Each group operates in its own system, and reconciling all of it falls on the people in the middle. In a 24-hour operation running four rotating shifts, every manual handoff carries risk.
"The worst case is if something didn't get conveyed and you assumed that something was happening and it's not. And so that creates undue delay and risk for the business."
And staying the course has its own price tag. "There is no free option. It might feel free because you're not spending capital to invest in a new software, but not doing anything is a cost. You're still spending people's time."
Datacor and CITGO had worked together since the 1980s — but their relationship had stayed within the boundaries of the lab. That changed during a product demonstration when Bloomquist started asking a different question: what about the space between departments?
"Nexus started from a demonstration from Datacore showing us a few of their other products, and I had not really ever considered LIMS being an integrated partner with logistics. We started a conversation about how much more integrated could those systems be, and we showed them where our in-house developments were and that there were still a very manually intensive check and balance associated with that. And so we started collaborating on what could be a more digital forward process."
Nexus is the result of that collaboration — a logistics management system that connects every team involved in the product lifecycle into a single, real-time view. Trading. Operations. The lab. Logistics. Compliance. Finance. Every department that has a stake in where a product is now has access to the same information at the same time.
"The new dashboard that is Nexus really integrates the business as a whole. You have operations, you have the lab, you have compliance, you have logistics, and then you really have the whole trading arm of the business. And so everybody wants to know where their product is and where it is in the process."
An order number entered into the system becomes a traceable thread that moves through every stage — from contract to production plan, to certification, to shipment. Exceptions and waivers that once lived in verbal conversations are now handled digitally and in real time. Every decision is documented. The audit trail builds itself as the work happens.
"Do you have the controls you need? I think you would be challenged to say that there's not room for improvement, and digitalization is certainly available today."
The impact was felt across every department that had previously been working in isolation.
"Most people can self-service their questions. When we convey what we plan to do, that plan continues forward without much babysitting. That's freed up a considerable amount of time for my team to focus on making plans instead of following up and making sure the plan is being executed as we would expect."
Shift handoffs, one of the highest-risk points in any 24-hour operation, no longer depend on whether the right information was passed verbally. The plan lives in the system. Every shift can see it.
"The biggest benefit has been work consistency, because there's never a question of if the orders have been created, because there's no way for them to get lost in communication. Rework is probably one of the biggest benefits that we see in Nexus — you don't spend time validating and reworking systems and making sure that there was a proper handoff. The team is spending less time redoing work."
For compliance, end-of-year attestation that once required pulling data from multiple systems and reconstructing decisions made months ago is now a single-click exercise.
And the partnership that built Nexus continues to drive it forward. "The customer service is bar none. It's a 24-hour operation, and it's 24-hour support." The product roadmap reflects that same ambition: "I really expect Nexus to take on the next step of ensuring that we know where every barrel has been or is going to go in any time envelope. I really think we can get there."
For fuels and chemical refining facilities still running on phone calls and disconnected systems, the question Bloomquist poses is a simple one: "Do you have the controls that you want? I think you would be challenged to say that there's not room for improvement, and digitalization is certainly available today."
Schedule a free consultation with Datacor BLISS NEXUS experts today.
Taylor's title is Hydrocarbon Logistics Manager at CITGO, but at your facility, that same role might be called Production Planning Manager, Refinery Scheduler, or Blending and Scheduling. Whatever the title, the problem is the same: too many departments, too little visibility, and too much time spent chasing information that should already be available.
Nexus is specifically designed to give these teams the structure and workflow to streamline interdepartmental communication so they can move product from feedstock to transport carrier efficiently, and on time, every time.
Every refinery has a Taylor. This story is for them.