Knowledge Management Strategies for Mitigating the Big Crew - Wipro

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Knowledge Management Strategies for mitigating the Big Crew Change in E&P This solution has the ability to save or create billions of dollars of oil revenue for individual companies. It will also help the industry meet the energy demands of the world economy at a time when the industry’s best and brightest are leaving the [1] [2] workforce. Introduction Wipro Consulting Services (WCS) has been delivering knowledge management strategies for its oil and gas customers since 1990, thus improving collaboration, regulatory compliance and operations. Within the last 5 years demand has increased for solutions to address the “Big Crew Change”. Wipro has worked with its customers on this issue and believes it has a solution that is applicable across the industry. This paper provides a solution overview and helps oil and gas companies with their strategies. Effective solutions improve business processes. Technology’s role is to act as an enabler, making it possible to do business in new ways. It is constantly changing, creating new opportunities. Breakthroughs in knowledge management, unified communications and social computing are providing value tools for reshaping business processes that can offset the impact of the Big Crew Change. Microsoft is an industry leader in many of these technologies. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Enterprise provides team collaboration, document management, records management, search, enterprise portals and other key functionality that can provide the foundation for any knowledge management system. Microsoft.s Unified Communications Solution integrates cleanly with MOSS and provides Voice-over-IP, presence, group chat and video conferencing. The combination of these two technologies has added new capabilities to the marketplace that can be used to rethink how business has been done and provide new levers to use in coping with the Big Crew Change. Microsoft included social networking in MOSS 2007 and plans to refine the technologies in SharePoint 14. While social networking technologies used in sites such as Facebook or MySpace have proven enormously popular with consumers, many businesses have failed to see the value of incorporating these technologies into their knowledge management infrastructure. Wikis, blogs, forums, and people searches have been seen as too imprecise and unregulated to be effective tools for operations. These tools, however, play an important role in Wipro’s solution. Instead of installing social networking components on a Website, Wipro has integrated them into new business processes. It has provided governance models and employee incentives to increase user acceptance. In Wipro’s solution implementation, these tools are referred to as Professional Networking tools in order to differentiate between what consumers use on the Internet and what would be built into a corporate knowledge management system. Using these tools in an oil and gas business environment is not new and many companies are experimenting with this technology on a small scale. A good example is Occidental Petroleum Corporation. Oxy has deployed a wiki site called Oxypedia to 300 users in its Elk Hills operation.3 Elk Hills supports operations in California where Oxy is the largest gas producer and third largest oil producer in the state. The site received 1500 hits on its first day and user acceptance has been excellent. The wiki is a repository for best practices and includes information on topics like normalizing well data, default settings for forecasting software such as Peep and Aires, and how to evaluate well data in Microsoft Excel. 4 | www.wipro.com/industryresearch WIPRO TECHNOLOGIES
Knowledge Management Strategies for mitigating the Big Crew Change in E&P In Wipro’s implementation of wikis, these elements are built into a much larger solution that links wikis to people, assets and processes, while using next generation search engines to quickly locate the information needed to solve a problem or locate a person who has the required knowledge. The solution goes one step further through communities and markets that greatly increase the knowledge pool. This will become critical as more and more knowledge leaves companies as people retire. Wipro has been studying this issue since 2007 and has worked with Rice University, Microsoft and customers formally and informally. Wipro is a Silver sponsor of Rice’s Energy Management program. Since Wipro plans to base this solution on the MOSS platform, Microsoft has funded research and provided technical expertise. Many of Wipro’s customers have shared information on their internal research programs. Wipro has provided a Proof-of-Concept (POC) to Petrobras in Houston, TX. Petrobras is [3] evaluating the POC’s ability to improve offshore operations in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM). The Challenge Most of the world’s “easy” oil is gone, forcing oil companies to focus on smaller oil fields, enhanced recovery, and deepwater oil. 4All three are engineering intensive and require large capital investments. This is happening at a time when most of the industry’s top engineering talent is about to retire. Making matters worse, universities are only providing a fraction of what is needed to replace the retirees. As a result, the oil industry is in a crisis. Twenty years ago there were fifteen “Super Giant” oil fields capable of producing a million barrels per day. Today there are only four.5 In order to meet production targets, companies are producing larger numbers of smaller fields. These smaller fields are resource-intensive, requiring substantially more engineering hours per barrel of oil produced. Smaller fields also scatter engineers, reducing productivity. Since it is unlikely that new Super Giant fields will be discovered, smaller fields will produce more and more of the world’s oil. As a result, the demand for petroleum engineers will increase year after year unless technology can be used to offset this trend. Since low-cost oil is becoming harder and harder to find, the industry is revisiting depleted oil fields with enhanced recovery technologies such as gas injection, chemical injection, ultrasonic stimulation, microbial recovery and thermal recovery. In a typical field only 20% to 40% of the oil can be produced by primary and secondary recovery means. With enhanced recovery this improves to 30% to 60%. The downside is the expense and the fact that it is engineering intensive. As energy prices increase, enhanced recovery makes economic sense. However, it will also further strain engineering resources. Seven of the last 10 Giant oil fields have been discovered in deep water off Brazil, in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Persian Gulf. Giant oil fields are capable of producing more than 100,000 barrels of oil per day or 10 percent of a Super Giant. For example, BP’s Thunderhorse platform 150 miles southeast of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico now produces between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels of oil. It came on line with seven wells in 20086. Future production may hit as much as a million barrels of oil per day from up to 50 wells. The semi-submersible platform cost over $1 billion dollars to build and accounts for 3.3% of current U.S. oil production. Thunderhorse was originally planned to come on line in 2005 and ran three years behind schedule. It is widely believed that a shortage of engineering talent contributed to the delay. Since there are likely few Giants and Super Giants left to be found on shore, the future of oil production will move off shore. This will further stress the short supply of engineering staff. 5 | www.wipro.com/industryresearch WIPRO TECHNOLOGIES
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