Information Management System for Operations

Background

Our client's North Sea operations information was siloed within asset specific individual document and data applications, with unclear ownership, poor consistency, fragmented audit trails and poor visibility of Management of Change.

There was a lack of confidence in the accuracy of information and business processes were rendered inefficient due to the quality of the underlying information. This contrasted with recent investment made in information management for engineering projects, leading to projects coming to a close facing an operations function unprepared to leverage the benefits realised in the projects domain.

Outcome

The various asset's applications will be combined in to a single system that performs validation on the information, linking, for example, tag numbers in a P&ID to relevant vendor data.

Venture's staff are an integral part of the client's multi-disciplinary team that has:

• Analysed the current status and problems.
• Assessed the technical capabilities of robust commercially-available software to support potential solutions, and elected suitable items.
• Proposed both an information clean-up and migration exercise and a change programme to address cultural and information quality aspects.
• Developed a business case based on costs and benefits of the approach.

Key assets and their associated applications have been identified and their business processes and information are currently under analysis. Further assets will be brought into the system using a phased approach that fits in with the priorities of the business and timelines of vendors scheduled application upgrades

Benefits

• The system will be based on the existing requirements of the business rather than implementing unnecessary functionality that may complicate existing business processes.
• The linkage of documents and data in the system leverages the benefits already realised by the similar systems of the project EPCs, benefits often lost in handover to Operations.
• Risks to existing operations, profitability and safety will be reduced by regaining control of information and confidence in its integrity.
• Substantial efficiency gains are anticipated in areas where the convergence of data and documents can support increased automation of workpack preparation and feedback (as described above).
• In addition to these benefits, the costs of implementing the single system are anticipated to be fully covered by the cost savings from the scheduled upgrades and support of the redundant applications once they are all replaced.
• On a broader basis, the approach is seen as establishing a model for potential benefit of the client's assets in other areas of the globe.