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Customer: Motiva RefineryIndustry: Fuels-Base Oils and ChemicalsRegion: United StatesUse cases: Laboratory Efficiency, Data Automation, Compliance
Motiva runs one of the largest and most complex refinery operations in the world. That scale puts unusual pressure on the lab: thousands of results, continuous operations, tightly regulated fuels, and multiple product lines that all require fast, defensible certification. For Motiva, the lab isn’t just a testing function: it’s a gate that determines whether product can move, sell, or blend profitably.
For years, Motiva operated on a legacy LIMS that had been heavily customized and supported under a different organizational model. As Motiva evolved into a standalone enterprise, the LIMS environment became increasingly dependent on aging customizations and support structures that were no longer available. What was once “tailored” to the refinery became difficult to maintain, difficult to modernize, and increasingly out of step with how Motiva needed the lab to operate.
At the same time, compliance expectations for fuels kept changing. Annual reporting requirements, product certification, and defensible traceability became more demanding—especially for gasoline. Motiva needed a system that could support modern compliance workflows without forcing the lab to rely on spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, or bolt-on tools that lived outside the LIMS.
Motiva evaluated its options, including upgrading within the existing vendor ecosystem and moving to a different platform. The tipping point was that an “upgrade” would effectively require a major rebuild anyway, so Motiva prioritized a system that could meet refinery QC realities out of the box, while still being adaptable to Motiva’s specific blending, sampling, and certification workflows.
That’s where BLISS stood apart.
Motiva chose BLISS because it aligned with how refinery labs actually work:
Bliss’s strength in job-based workflows
High-throughput certification
The ability to integrate lab results with operational needs.
What Motiva was really buying with BLISS LIMS is a combination of fit + integration + sustainability. They now have high-quality LIMS benefits with less reliance on fragile customization and disconnected tools.
Beyond core LIMS functions, BLISS provided stronger built-in QC capabilities and enabled Motiva to consolidate critical compliance reporting into the same system used for everyday lab execution to reduce re-entry, reduce reconciliation, and improve defensibility.
Implementation was not only a technology change. It was change management across a 24/7 environment with dozens of technicians and field operators. But once the system stabilized, the payoff came from two improvements Motiva cared about most:
Less manual work and fewer transcription errors through better instrument-to-LIMS automation and streamlined result review.
More consistent, repeatable workflows for refinery-specific processes like inline blending and sampling, so technicians and operators weren’t rebuilding the same structure every time.
In short, Motiva moved away from Thermo Fisher because they needed to modernize beyond a legacy, customization-dependent LIMS model, and chose BLISS because it delivered a better refinery fit, stronger QC/compliance alignment, and a practical path to automation and defensible reporting at Motiva’s scale.
Find out how our software solution can help you achieve greater container visibility and utilization. Schedule a free consultation with Datacor BLISS LIMS experts today.