Manufacturing Oil Gas Energy

Operation by Exception

Insights & Takeaways

Mergers and aquisitions can create inconsistant user experience and confusing interactions across different locales for the same functionality.
Excess of cost of ownership in maintaining customer facing applications
Human Centered Design as the driver to rationalization leads to a collaborative framework across various teams, understanding what users want and insights for functional and non functional requirements.
Simplicity, Recognition. Consistency whether in navigation, colors, fonts, art direction, and tone all lend to a more visible brand, especially if all these elements are implemented across multiple platforms and across public or customer facing various sites and subsites.
Studies reports that operational improvements and behavioral-psychology initiatives raised customer-experience scores by atleast 10 points. Such initiatives allow a faster growth, brand awareness and profitability.

Overview

Mistakes with identifying issues with machines, parts, accessories and not properly tracking history of all equipment in manufacturing, production, drilling operations etc. have significant costs that lead to large economic losses. A major part of this impact present themselves as Non Productive Time and Invisible Lost Time. Historically, these equipment’s have been identified by using stenciled identification numbers such as in case of drill pipes themselves or using paper trails and in some cases technologies like spreadsheets and documents. Human errors, improper access, lack of collaboration, errors reading and recording such numbers using visual identification have been the source of many of the problems. Here are some of the issues that may arise:
• Additional shipping costs associated such as with wrongly shipped drill pipes
• Costs related to delayed operations
• Added costs related to wrong inspections
• Potential use of damaged equipment
• Inaccurate depth control in oil gas

In a Brute Force Operational mode, qualified persons visit wells and operations sites each day. This poses serious limitations and burden on the resources. Operating by Exceptions however change the focus on problem areas.

“Using Design as a driver to implement a predictive and preventative approach considerably reduces costs and downtime.”

Challenge

Our Human Centered and Experience research team members conducted a detailed study interviewing and observing with well operators, operations teams, rig personnel, drill pipe manufacturers and rental companies, Inspection companies, logistical providers. We also compare the impact on productivity due to various cultural and geographical factors. In this detailed study conducted in the US, Australia, Austria and New Zealand we identified plenty of areas that posed challenges and here is a summary:
• Loss of production and efficiency due to Non-Productive Time (NPT) and Invisible Lost Time (ILT)
• Increased costs due to poor logistics system which fails to deliver correct oil field assets to where they are needed
• Poorly timed inspections and maintenance of oil field assets
• Risk of using quarantined or damaged assets
• Inaccurate depth control
• Failure to use current systems due to employees’ lack of understanding
• Poor workflow, lack of integration, rigid reporting capabilities and limited to no offline features of current systems
• Failing to account for labor intensive and safety concerns of the rig environment with current systems

Outcome

More than 50,000 assets were digitized with historical tracking in the first two months of implementation. The fully integrated platform connected and created a collaborative environment for offshore/onshore operations, inspection yards and storage facilities with future potential to connect asset manufacturers, rental companies etc. We built a predictive analytics and scheduling system to predict lifetime of assets, fatigue, inspection status, real time alerts and notifications, unavailability of assets allowing Operation by Exception rather than a Brute Force method.

Days 1-30

Initiation, Stakeholder Interviews & Viability

Given the complex ecosystem, millions of site visitors and environment, a detailed plan was put in place to build a secure and scalable solution. Our experts worked with the solution enablement team, digital marketing, architects and platform managers to understand requirements and align on vision. A study was conducted to create a unified experience, single point of control for the overall brand enablement and delivering content as a service using a cross platform framework.

Days 31-60

Evaluation, Benchmarking & Feasbility

A current state assessment was performed on the overall user experience to identify pain points and areas for improvements. As the overall external facing sites and applications was 24, benchmarking was performed and usability scores obtained on key customer and government facing sites and applications. The design team worked with the marketing and platform team to clearly define corporate branding. The user experience layer was seperated for a single point of control from content.

Days 61-90

Design System, Prototypes and Proof of Concept

The unified user experience would be delivered through componentization and atomic design concepts creating consistancy and scalability. Interactive prototypes and components were created with a single point of control and the ability to preview the overall brand and user experience layer iteratively with feedback.

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