Oil and Gas, Technology and Humans by Eirik Albrechtsen Denis Besnard

Author:Eirik Albrechtsen, Denis Besnard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Limited
Published: 2013-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

Integrated Planning

Traditionally, the planning of maintenance and operations in the offshore oil and gas industry has faced many challenges. Some of these include: the plurality of disciplines and activities involved, their different demands, unforeseen tasks, bad weather and logistical challenges related to material and personnel resources. The unpredictable environment found in offshore operations creates a situation where plans may have to be changed or abandoned at any moment. These constraints make it difficult for the organization to achieve optimal decision-making and responsiveness (Sleire and Wahl, 2008).

IPL attempts to provide a response to these problems. It implements IO principles and is designed to improve operational and maintenance planning in the oil and gas industry. The approach is holistic; the goal is to improve decision-making and create a more flexible and better-coordinated plan that can cope with the unpredictable nature of offshore operations (Ramstad et al., 2010). At the same time the IPL process aims to optimize the performance of the organization. It takes into account all of the task and resource demands of each of the various disciplines involved and integrates discipline-specific plans into one global plan. Tasks are evaluated and prioritized according to their criticality, in order to ensure that the right decisions (in terms of safety and production) are taken. The assessment also takes into account future constraints and any opportunities that can be identified. The result is a coordinated and feasible operational plan that can be executed with the necessary resources available.

Implementation of the IPL process requires several key enabling factors to be in place. The most important of these is Information and Communication Technology (ICT). These tools must provide real-time information and enable collaboration and communication across disciplines, organizations and geographical distance. Other important factors relate to organizational culture and include commitment, collaboration and competence. In addition, it is critical to establish organizational learning practices that include the use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and continual adjustment processes (Ramstad et al., 2010).

Planning is organized according to various timescales distributed across a hierarchy of plans. Long-term planning concerns the realization of strategic goals and targets at a company level, which is expressed in strategic and tactical plans. Strategic plans describe ‘what we want to accomplish’, while tactical plans outline ‘how we get there’. The long-term plan forms the basis for shorter-term planning (usually three months). In the short-term plan specific task schedules are defined and activities are described as work orders. The final detailed planning covers two-week periods. These provide a description of the offshore work that must be carried out in order to execute the plan, for each discipline involved. Incomplete tasks are added to a backlog and usually fed back into future plans.

Figure 8.1 shows this complex process. Production plans are shown on the left and logistics plans on the right. In order to establish an integrated plan, all of these individual plans must be incorporated into one single plan at all levels of the hierarchy. Coordination of the different plans must follow the continuous planning cycle shown in the centre of the figure.

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