PEOPLE
Mario Šokčević
Mario Šokčević is a seasoned refinery planning and optimisation professional, who brings a valuable combination of:
More than 10 years of refinery planning experience
Extensive knowledge and expertise of petroleum refining technology
Deep understanding of linear programming (LP) optimisation techniques
Vast practical experience in decision making support and devising solutions with real-life outcomes
Strategic mindset and strong commercial and business acumen, combined with sound abilities in recognising critical details
Passion and highly valued skills for teaching, underpinned by strong customer focus and great communication skills
High professional and ethical standards
This combination, along with previous engagements and successes enable Mario to create a tangible impact for customers.
Mario spent seven years in various planning roles at MOL Group, a complex regional refiner with multiple refineries and petrochemical plants, where he had the opportunity to encounter a wide range of planning scenarios, gained a solid technical knowledge of refining technology and LP optimisation, and had a strong exposure to decision making support in decisions regarding investments of various sizes and operational solutions.
After MOL Group, Mario spent four years at AspenTech, the world’s largest refinery optimisation software company. During the two years spent in training and technical support, he gained even more exposure to various refinery planning models and modelling problems, and he successfully delivered all levels of refinery LP training to 150 individuals from 35 companies and 25 countries. The next two years working as a Customer Success Manager meant further client engagement on projects, focusing on value creation to customers, helping customer management to improve their businesses’ bottom line as well as holding deep-dive technical workshops to their analysts, while leveraging his solid project and people management skills. These two years allowed him to further enhance his strong strategical and commercial thinking while working alongside senior sales experts in creating commercial strategies for major customers.
His extensive knowledge gained over the years has consistently been recognised and appreciated both by peers and clients. Solid knowledge, together with his wide-reaching, strategic and even bold thinking as well as his persistence can often result in out-of-the-box solutions, which can potentially bring high additional value to customers.
Deep understanding of linear programming optimisation techniques together with a vast experience in refinery planning model maintenance, model review and model support means confident resolution of technical hurdles in modelling and creation of solutions that can stand the test of time and of different applications.
Strategic mindset enables Mario to recognise strengths, weaknesses as well as future opportunities and risks, whether providing advice on future actions or devising and building a system for a client.
Mario has a passion for teaching. He was happily training and mentoring his junior colleagues throughout his whole career. He could take this to the next level during his first role at Aspentech, where he greatly enjoyed that his previous ‘hobby’ became one of his main duties.
Mario has strong teaching skills, a strong internal drive for knowledge transfer and great abilities to explain complex concepts to a wide variety of audience. His exceptional communication skills and deep focus on each student’s progress are an irreplaceable asset during training.
Mario deems that knowledge and skills mean power and ability, thus effective knowledge transfer is empowerment and enablement.
More than 10 years of professional experience brings maturity. The solid technical and business expertise, supported by his high professional and ethical standards, puts Mario into a confident and trusted advisor position, and enables Zanin, the consultancy funded by Mario, to achieve its goal: to fill the gap in the refinery planning consultancy market, being a highly specialised, trusted consultancy, offering deep knowledge, focusing on knowledge sharing and on creating real value to customers.
