The First QuestionSOON
Before any fix: how long does it take to pull the full history of one machine?
You Don't Have a Data Problem
Why capture — not analytics — is where plant intelligence actually starts.
The idea
Plants don't have a data problem. They have a capture problem.
The richest source of operational truth — what operators see, hear, and do on shift — is rarely captured in a form any system can use. It's spoken over radios, held in memory, scattered across spreadsheets. And lost.
I call it the capture layer — turning what the floor already knows into structured data, at the moment it happens. Not bigger models. Better capture.
01
Capture at the moment
The watch-item, the half-finished job, the warning at handover — logged when it happens, not reconstructed after.02
The model never decides
Language captures and classifies; a deterministic engine stays the system of record. A design an operating plant can trust.03
Built on the floor
Designed from the shift, not from a spec sheet. It works because the person who built it has stood where you stand.The shift log — writing
The Floor Has the Edge
The people closest to the problem hold the data nobody ever wrote down.
Read →What a Handover Has to Carry
The four things every shift change has to move — and what breaks when one slips.
Read →Piper Alpha, 38 Years On
What the gap between two crews can cost, and the handover discipline that closes it.
Read →The three most recent entries are published here in full. Newer and earlier pieces first appear on LinkedIn — full versions land on this page.
Learning in public
Alongside the writing, I'm teaching myself to build automations that take the manual busywork out of operations — reports, summaries, the paperwork around a shift — and sharing what I learn, in plain terms, for other operators. A few of the things I'm building:
Demo · on my own time
Refinery OS
A shift-intelligence platform for plant floors: capture every equipment defect and shift handover the moment it happens, so the history is always there. I designed it from ten years on shift, and run it myself.
refineryost.com → Open sourceGolem's Docs GPT
Grounded Q&A over your own documents — every answer traced back to the exact source line, never invented. Built on Claude; bring your own key.
View on GitHub →
The pattern
One spine, many floors
The same capture spine has been cloned for marine operations and training — days, not months. The idea isn't refinery-specific. It's shift-specific.
About
I'm not a software vendor who read about plants — I've run them. Ten years on the floor: gold processing in the Philippines, then alumina refining — the Bayer process — at a Gulf refinery, as a licensed metallurgical engineer and shift supervisor who issues the permits and leads the crew.
I build the tools I wished I had at the 6 a.m. handover. Whatever I make works because the person who made it has stood where you stand.
Bayer ProcessHydrometallurgyGold CIL / CIPDCS OperationPermit to WorkProcess SafetyRoot Cause AnalysisLean Six SigmaPython
Stay in touch
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Or reach me directly — rcapisinio@gmail.com