NPRA Reliability & Maintenance Conference and Exhibition - May 19 -22, 2009

Bethesda, Maryland, June 2009 — Asset Performance Networks exhibited at the NPRA (National Petroleum and Refiners Association) Reliability and Maintenance Exhibition in Grapevine, Texas. The conference was attended by maintenance and plant managers from the refining and petro-chemical industries. The 3-day program included keynote addresses, technical and management presentations, discussion groups, structured question and answer sessions, and an exhibition of products and services. AP-Networks was on hand to provide information about our products and services, as well as hands-on demonstrations of the Turnaround-Network.com^©, NaviTrack^™, and Pyxis^©.

In terms of owner company participation and traffic in the exhibit halls, this NPRA was starkly different from those in the past as attendance was drastically down. Even with the smaller numbers, Brett Schroeder’s presentation entitled "Trade-off Economics in Plant Turnarounds" was one of the more highly attended and well received presentations of the week. Brett presented a framework to evaluate the specific trade-off decisions on the overall economic viability of plant turnarounds. The analysis was based on a database of actual turnaround performance and quantified the relationships between key factors such as shift patterns, labor productivity, turnaround duration, fixed costs, safety, oil price, and lost production.