Engineering Technical Practices Management at BP

Transcription

1 INSIGHT# ALM FEBRUARY 26, 2009 Engineering Technical Practices Management at BP By Clint Reiser Keywords Technical Practices, Document Management, AIM, Documentum Overview Asset Information Management (AIM) should be a key concern for any company that is serious about improving its Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM). Organizations need an enormous Asset Information Management (AIM) amount of information about their assets to effectively operate and maintain them. This should be a key topic for any company that is serious about improving its Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM). information comes in a wide variety of information types, like documents, drawings, 3D While many products address key portions models, data tables, etc. and is used by a broad of the AIM challenge, there are still no base of stakeholders across the full asset lifecycle. It must be complete, comprehensive, complete, comprehensive AIM solutions on the market. Organizations that want to accurate, consistent and timely to ensure that improve their situation will need to weave together a solution from a set of everyone makes appropriate decisions and this information management capabilities that dictates the need for a proper set of AIM address different aspects of the problem. processes supported by an appropriate set of IT technology solutions. BP was faced with disparate sets of technical practice standards that were Most of the IT solutions used in the design, inherited from a wave of acquisitions in the build, operation and maintenance of facilities late 1990s. This report discusses the already provide good AIM support documents processes and software solutions they used for their target set of information and stakeholders. However, there is no one product on to unify and improve the maintenance and revision of these standards. the market today that addresses the entire AIM issue. Organizations need to understand this situation and develop strategies that integrate individual solution capabilities into one IT environment that provides full coverage. THOUGHT LEADERS FOR MANUFACTURING & SUPPLY CHAIN

2 ARC Insights, Page 2 Document management is a fundamental AIM issue. It can be addressed in many different ways and is therefore a good place to start in developing an AIM strategy. This case study discusses an approach that BP used to gain better control of the documents that they use to manage and communicate their engineering technical practice standards. Centralization at BP Improves Corporate Learning In the late 1990s, BP acquired a number of companies, including ARCO, Amoco, and Castrol. Each company brought its own set of engineering technical practice standards to the BP organization. This was both a source of inconsistency and a barrier to knowledge sharing across the company. In 2001, BP initiated a project to address this issue by merging the disparate standards from the heritage companies into one central set of engineering standards. BP created a central department, Engineering Technical Practices (ETP), to create and maintain BP engineering practices for both the exploration and production segments of the corporation. In the context of this initiative, BP's technical documentation comprised the standard practices related to the Documentum was selected as the platform for the technical document design, purchase, commissioning, installation, and inspection of equipment throughout BP. The documents management system. BP chose to build a user-friendly custom solution on top of Documentum to meet would be authored and owned by designated subject their workflow requirements. matter experts (SMEs) from the various discipline categories (instrumentation, valves, etc.) within the corporation. Once authored and published, more than 10,000 BP technical people, primarily engineers and field technicians, would have access to the documents. ETP Library Unites Documents and Workflow The ETP department set out to develop a technical document management system to manage the ETP documents and enable the associated processes. Documentum was currently in place at BP as the corporate enterprise content management platform. Since the company knew this to be a flexible, easy-to-customize platform, they also chose it as the platform for the technical document management system. However, additional functionality was required to meet the workflow needs for the initiative. Since BP could not identify an existing out-of-the-box application that provided this functionality, they decided to meet the unsatisfied requirements by building a

3 ARC Insights, Page 3 custom solution on top of Documentum. BP would later call this custom solution the "ETP Library." The ETP Library was designed to provide 10,000 BP employees and external consultants with access to the system. The library provided a userfriendly interface to assure widespread adoption. Metadata, such as document number, key words, title, and taxonomy category, were coupled with the documents. This provided users with multiple search options and the ability to navigate via the taxonomy by which the documents had been stored. Corporate level documents in the ETP Library were accompanied by documents containing local practice variations added to reflect local regulations. For example, if a department at a specific location needed to purchase a heat exchanger, users at the location could access both the corporate document and the local document that included process exceptions as required by the local government. The system simplified the management of location-specific documents by limiting visibility to users at the respective locations. ETP Shared Learnings Enables Continuous Improvement through Collaboration The ETP Library provided a system for centrally managing the documents. However, the ETP initiative also required a process that would enable users and authors to continuously improve the documentation. This required the ability to capture questions on content and suggestions The ETP department was looking to complement the Library with the for improvement and modifications from document ability to facilitate collaboration users. It also required a mechanism by which these among its users. questions and comments could be reviewed, validated, and eventually made visible for reference, along with This was achieved through the the affiliated technical documents. This integrated customization of their current Lotus presentation provided additional value to the initiative Domino solution and integration through improved visibility into discussions and suggestions surrounding the official with the ETP Library. practices. BP chose to leverage the collaboration capabilities of its existing Lotus Domino application to address these document- related communication needs. Only minimal customization was required. The process involved cloning of the existing solution, minimal extension of functionality, and integration with the ETP Library. The new resulting solution, "ETP Shared Learnings,"

4 ARC Insights, Page 4 utilized the same taxonomy as the Library, enabling the association of shared learnings with the relevant official documentation. When the integration was completed, users would The result of the initiative was a set of access the technical practices document of interest. processes and tools that provide a The users were able to add confidential comments valuable framework for the management and continual improvement of technical in ETP Shared Learnings to open a dialog with the practice documentation at BP. subject matter experts. The subject matter experts would review and validate the comments and suggestions. Once validated, these comments and suggestions would be made visible as "shared learnings" to users in a pane adjacent to the associated technical document. Periodically, the shared learnings would be added to an updated version of the official document and simultaneously removed from the shared learnings area. As this process repeated itself, the shared learnings area would once again serve as a vehicle for future document revisions. The end-to-end process and the supporting technology have provided a valuable framework for managing and continually improving technical practices and the associated documentation at BP. Last Word Engineering technical practices is a good example of the kinds of document management challenges that are fundamental across ALM. In this case study, BP developed a good set of processes for managing the lifecycle of its technical documentation. BP enabled these processes using an IT solution that leveraged existing investments in document management and collaboration infrastructure. While, at the time, BP had to augment their solution capabilities with custom code, more modern versions of these kinds of infrastructure components have considerably more built-in capability to meet specific requirements. The workflow support tools included in modern platforms would also ease the development of any custom code that might still be needed to support specific processes for management of change and lessons learned. Future ARC reports will present case studies of how other companies are addressing various AIM issues, outlining their challenge, the approach they chose, and the results of each initiative. ARC intends for this collection of reports to provide our clients with a valuable frame of reference for their own internal process improvement initiatives. We welcome your feedback on which AIM issues we should be addressing and would also like to hear

5 ARC Insights, Page 5 about your success stories around AIM, particularly ones that you would be willing to share with the ARC ALM community. For further information or to provide feedback on this Insight, please contact your account manager or the author at creiser@arcweb.com. ARC Insights are published and copyrighted by ARC Advisory Group. The information is proprietary to ARC and no part of it may be reproduced without prior permission from ARC.