With the use of Visavi, Repsol Sinopec Resources UK has increased schedule attainment from 65% to 88%. The exploration and production company has the aspiration to see 7-to-8-hour productive days on their sites where Visavi is implemented.
Repsol Sinopec Resources UK is an oil and gas exploration and production (E&P) company operating in the North Sea. Based in Aberdeen, Scotland, the company has interests in 48 fields, with 11 offshore installations and 2 onshore terminals.
As with other E&P companies with large and complex operations, Repsol Sinopec Resources UK experienced resource planning challenges in their day-to-day operations, including personnel on board (POB) constraints, inconsistent “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” (YTT) sessions, core team underutilization, and unreliable estimates in the work management system (WMS).
Andrew Birkenshaw is Head of Operations Services at Repsol Sinopec Resources UK, and in October 2021, he was a guest in our webinar. There he explained that the company wanted a solution that would improve resource planning and usage:
– We wanted to explore ways to get more work done in a safe, efficient, and planned manner, with the same amount of core crew resources, he explained.
In 2018, following a meeting at an SPE conference in Aberdeen, the E&P company started collaborating with Visavi.
Watch our webinar: How to optimize resource planning and usage in the oil and gas industry.
Immediate operational efficiency improvements
Birkenshaw outlines what they were trying to achieve, and he highlights increased visibility of service scopes, better visualization of core crew resources required to support Major Capital Projects, and having a Maintenance Team Lead (MTL) in better command of the frozen week plan. They were also looking to improve uptime through better offshore interaction with scheduling.
– Through better planning and scheduling, we can get more done with the same people and improve the efficiency of our operations, he said.
Like most E&Ps, the company utilized different tools for planning and scheduling in its operations. Visavi interfaces with their existing suite and gives them a visualization of their existing data in an interactive game board, accessible for all employees across disciplines.
By visualizing the data from your existing systems, everyone involved in the operations gets the same information in real-time.
The implementation of Visavi resulted in immediate improvements. Schedule attainment increased from 65% to 88% over 11 weeks, and they have observed an increase in tool time since deployment. Birkenshaw commended Visavi:
– Typically, we are scheduling 300-400 work orders a week. An effect of Visavi is more hours a day productivity. This ultimately means that the efficiency of the platform is going up and the cost to do that is going down or improving.
Introducing Visavi to support the existing scheduling process has also resulted in multiple intangible benefits, including improved behaviors to close out work orders by task, visibility improvements, process improvements, and the ability to react faster to unplanned events or week changes.
– This is the result of having all relevant information contained in one central area. Platform efficiency is definitely going up, and the cost of doing that is improving, Birkenshaw said.
Repsol Sinopec Resources UK uses Visavi to visualize the data derived from a suite of tools:
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Maximo (WMS)
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P6 (Planning Tool)
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Vantage (Logistics Management Tool)
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Personnel On Board (POB) trackers
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Excel shipping schedule
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Weather forecasting
Breaking old habits
At Repsol Sinopec Resources UK, Visavi is used daily by offshore supervisors and discipline engineers, schedulers, and planners at its onshore operations center. The initial training was done remotely across teams, with no classroom training required. Birkenshaw praised Visavi:
– The system is very intuitive.
However, he admits an initial reluctance to change. Jobs in the oil and gas industry require staff to work in rotating shifts, so it’s easy to fall back into old habits when returning to site, especially if you’ve been working on the same site for a long time.
Birkenshaw expanded on the challenges of adopting a new system:
– When you leave the site and don’t think about work for three weeks, there’s a tendency to stray into old behaviors when you go back. The key thing for us was the behavioral change hurdle. We needed to explain why we’re using Visavi. Once that was understood, the adoption was fairly quick.
Following a successful implementation of Visavi on one of its key assets, Claymore, outside Aberdeen, Repsol Sinopec Resources UK has decided to implement the tool across its portfolio.
– Improved schedule attainment and compliance mean that we are now completing more work with the same people, Birkenshaw concluded.
