Petrofac on delivering efficiency to the oil and gas industry
October 14, 2020 | 5 minute readDesigning and building best-in-class facilities for the energy industry is a complex business. One market leader, Petrofac, recognized they needed a powerful and flexible document management system with streamlined processes to best support their clients.
Petrofac designs, builds, manages, and maintains infrastructure for the petrochemicals and renewable energy industries. The company offers services across each stage of the project lifecycle and various commercial models, and it has implemented Lean processes and Six Sigma methodologies to improve delivery to customers.
To support these activities, the company sought an electronic document management system (EDMS) to ensure version control and a single repository. Petrofac also needed powerful and flexible workflows to manage engineering documents, vendor documents, and technical documents.
The company selected Oracle’s Primavera Unifier to meet their project and asset lifecycle management needs.
Spearheading digital transformation
Fortunately, Petrofac understands that any successful organization undergoing digital transformation must have the right expertise. Qasir Hussain, director of digital transformation, has been spearheading the effort for Petrofac with significant results.
At a high level, Petrofac identified key criteria after assessing technology solutions. The organization sought an accessible, secure, and proven cloud-based construction management software system to provide both transparency and a complete audit trail across their 31 offices consisting of approximately 11,500 staff and 80 nationalities.
Streamlining operational processes
Petrofac is gaining great value from their Primavera Unifier implementation. “It is so flexible. Any process can be managed on it,” says Hussain.
Hussain continues: "Petrofac is implementing the Oracle solution to streamline our operational processes for remote offices in both our onshore and offshore office environments. We are making use of the web and mobile application to help us maintain regulatory compliance associated with our license to operate.”
Keith Scott, director of duty holder assets at Petrofac, says:
“We are also driving process efficiencies resulting in cost savings and an accelerated pace of execution by eliminating traditional spreadsheets and forms and moving to digital workflows. We are seeing huge potential from Primavera Unifier and are engaged in implementation across our Operations Services service line.”
Petrofac recognizes the importance of integration to provide data assurance in addition to system accessibility, flexibility, and uptime. The organization has already integrated the Oracle solution with their plan review solution.
Petrofac also has plans to integrate Primavera Unifier with Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM) to support portfolio management, Oracle’s Primavera Analytics to gain further insights, and Oracle Fusion Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), to connect to their purchase order management.
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“The company as a whole is benefiting from the value of insight and improvement using Oracle’s Primavera Unifier.”
- Qasir Hussain, Director of Digital Transformation, Petrofac
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A methodical organization, Petrofac is working on one piece of functionality at a time, ensuring a high quality rollout. “We deliver one thing and deliver it well,” says Hussain.
Three-pronged approach to system roll out
Petrofac’s three-pronged approach to system rollout is the key to its successful implementation, including:
1) A centralized approach to system implementation yields the efficiencies of standardization.
2) End users own the process definitions and specifications at the individual business level.
3) Business-level end users work hand in hand with business-specific technical staff, including a technology leader, to implement business processes.
This approach ensures optimal configuration, training, buy-in, and adoption. The model of bringing the end users into the system configuration phase is quite a departure from the past.
A popular older model entailed IT developing solutions in isolation before delivering these solutions to the business users.
Effectively managing corporate change
Petrofac conducts weekly calls to review priorities in support of their collaborative rollout. The company maps their business processes to the processes slated to be built within Primavera Unifier, and all tasks and backlog are resourced against duration and benefits.
Hussain regards his methodology for rolling out the Oracle solution as instrumental to effectively managing the corporate change necessary for a successful implementation.
Luaai Shannan, senior manager, information management, brings over 15 years of oil and gas information management experience. Shannan finds the centralized approach critical to addressing the challenges of this complex industry across planning, cost management, engineering, and supply chain and construction—all while interfacing with numerous subcontractors, suppliers, and clients.
“Oracle’s Primavera Unifier platform provides a centralized approach and solution to help avoid siloed, overlapping, or inconsistent information due to separate platforms. The tool’s flexibility helps us maintain our corporate standards and clients’ requirements,” says Shannan.
Autonomy
Autonomy is another area of focus for Petrofac. The company has traditionally relied on third party system support for configuration and integration.
However, as part of their Primavera Unifier implementation, Petrofac is building this expertise in-house through a regimented and comprehensive training program they are promoting throughout their organization.
Hussain has developed an in-house certification for Petrofac. He strongly believes that “training should lead to learning” and that “the team is excited to have in-house capabilities” because they increase ownership and improve adoption and engagement. Hussain created a training curriculum geared to develop true experts in configuration, integration, and support, unlike many training programs geared largely toward system use.
Individuals spend about four hours a week in ongoing training. Employees learn new information and hone their skills in a safe environment. The training schedule is as follows:
1) Take a course
2) Use that information and become an expert
3) Demonstrate expertise: individuals explain how and why they implemented a solution the way they did.
The various members analyze each other’s work and discuss the best ways to implement processes. “It is a very positive and collaborative process,” says Hussain.
4) Move to the next level of learning and repeat the process
Petrofac can leverage the data from the Oracle solution to define where the value-added work is before the data flows into their analytics tools. Employees can see where their work is performing well in addition to where issues are arising.
This visibility helps employees implement best practices and corrective actions promptly and effectively.
Learn more about Oracle’s Primavera Unifier.
Oracle Construction and Engineering, the global leader in construction management software and project portfolio management solutions, helps you connect your teams, processes, and data across the project and asset lifecycle. Drive efficiency and control in project delivery with proven solutions for project controls, construction scheduling, portfolio management, BIM/CDE, construction payment management, and more.
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