Operations Control and Reporting System (OCRS)

When a major oil and gas company formed an operations team to start-up the world's largest FPSO (Floating, Production, Storage, Offloading vessel) in West Africa, they faced a variety of operational challenges:

• A new and diverse operations team with different heritage, various nationalities and diverse operational experiences.
• The need to achieve steady state operations as quickly as possible upon start up in order to maximise return on investment.
• A start up team that mostly consisted of expatriates when the long-term management of the asset would be handed over to a local workforce.

Many existing initiatives addressed individual performance, but they failed to determine how the overall operational process would function daily, weekly, monthly, and beyond.

Petrotechnics' integrated safe system of work solution, Sentinel PRO had already been successfully deployed on the FPSO and had been adopted as the global standard for all greenfield developments.

Having already demonstrated its creativity in developing frontline work execution solutions and delivering measurable, sustainable performance improvements, Petrotechnics was invited to develop a standardised operational management process and a way of delivering the process that would ensure effective implementation, complete operational integrity and maximum operational efficiency from day one.

Petrotechnics' response to this challenge was a solution that became known as Operations Control and Reporting System (OCRS). Though the final output looks like an IT solution, the real value is realised in the journey taken to get there.

Petrotechnics' team of professionals with extensive knowledge and experience in process design and development and business process harmonisation worked closely with the project's operations team to develop an operating model for key management, operations, maintenance and HSE processes.

The model was validated with "Day in the Life" simulations to determine exactly how the asset would be managed at a detailed level.

This involved process design and development, detailed agendas for management and operations meetings, identification of data sources and required outputs for effective decision making.

Petrotechnics developed an interactive, web-based process map that allows users to navigate around the operational process and see their role and actions associated with any activity. For each activity and meeting the system details the input, participants, actions and outputs. The system serves as a training tool for new employees and ensures a standardised and consistent operational model exists from day one of an operation and continues throughout the life of the asset.

OCRS was deployed while the FPSO was being towed to its location in West Africa. It was adopted immediately and continues to serve as the desktop application out of which other systems are launched. The implementation of OCRS has already added significant value to operations:

• All employees work to a common, standardised process
• A consistent operational model existed from day one of operations and will continue for the life of the asset
• Petrotechnics and OCRS were credited for the project's exceptionally efficient start up
• OCRS was recommended and adopted as standard for all greenfield developments
• OCRS has since been deployed on another African project and it is also currently under development for a venture in the Russian Far East.