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Within the Oil & Gas industry, capital projects cost a great deal of money and come at high risk. Complex projects can last several years and cost billions of dollars. Now more than ever, Oil & Gas companies seek to reduce the total installed cost of an upstream project and to smooth the transition to operations as smoothly and easily as possible.
During their complex lifecycle, capital projects generate a significant amount of information in the form of documents describing requirements, specifications, plans and operations. However, these documents are rarely standardized across diverse processes (e.g. specifications documents differ in form and function from operations documents) or vendors. In short, a quick search for the complete set of documents critical to the success or completion of a capital project may be difficult or almost impossible because of the absence of a common “language” describing the content within each document. The solution is a new way to approach how information is created, stored and delivered to workers throughout the company. SchemaLogic’s enterprise solution for managing content and document metadata enables Oil & Gas companies to model, update and synchronize content across project document repositories or collections for greater reliability and reduced total installed cost.
An estimated 6% of an Oil & Gas capital project budget is wasted due to inefficient information management. For a US$2B project, the loss is over US$120M due to problems as frustratingly common as the inability to locate a document or a misunderstanding about which document is needed. One cause of the inefficiency is that various vendors on multiple project teams create documents that describe critical aspects of the same project. Oftentimes, vendors describe those documents differently, even if corporate or industry standards exist that should be followed. The result is an inability for information workers to adequately describe the documents and what they contain. When other employees need to search for these documents, the results are often misleading or incorrect, and a project can be delayed for days or derailed for months.
Example: Employees airlift a critical part across the global to support a project schedule, only to discover that the part is already on site, but labeled differently in the project plan versus the work order. For many capital projects, collaboration and content management systems—such as Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 or EMC Documentum—comprise the core of the project’s workspace and provide a central location for teams to create and store information. These systems can scale out to hundreds or even thousands of sites and repositories containing hundreds of thousands of documents created during the lifespan of a capital project, in addition to any existing documents carried over from previous projects. But the ease of use and widespread adoption of systems like SharePoint and Documentum can be a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, team members have access to a wide array of documents and information around the clock. No matter where the project is located, global teams can contribute and use information during the many phases of a capital project. On the other hand, the speed and ease of use means that many different people in many different departments, even in many different countries, are loading information into the system with inconsistent descriptions of document types and the content they contain. With potentially hundreds of document formats and thousands of documents for each format, the challenge of successfully finding a single, specific document can be daunting.
One method for managing information to make it more “findable” is to enrich documents with metadata (basically, “information about information”.) Content authors and business stakeholders within a SharePoint or Documentum system can utilize metadata to narrow search results. Even if all the parties (vendors, for example) don’t use the same terms to describe a document, the metadata model can define synonyms and relationships between terms so that the search engines deliver the most complete set of results. This efficiency is most significant during the final phases of a project when the operational staff—who need easy familiarity with the end systems —take over and depend on the data contained in the operational documents.
Using SchemaLogic to manage metadata, document descriptions are consistent, increasing findability and greatly reducing the risks of misunderstandings and mistakes amongst vendors, the project team, and even separate branches of the same team. In the long run, this saves companies millions of dollars during capital installation projects.
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