Client Background

• Client: Integrated oil & gas supermajor
• Services: Involved in exploration, production, transportation, storage, processing as well as marketing of high-performance fuels, lubricants and petrochemicals
• Geographies: The US, Canada, Asia, Europe
  

Challenge
The O&G supermajor was facing variance in business responsiveness of their subsurface petrotech application. This was partly due to non-standardized business process and ways of working of the subsurface teams across regions, and partly due to the applications being slow. These resulted in longer turnaround time, low stakeholder satisfaction and increased cost of ownership.

Their legacy technology was unable to address the business requirements of cross-functional teams that included geologists, survey and drilling professionals, well delivery teams, etc.

The problem got compounded due to integration of more than 70 regional applications with no visibility into product upgrades and releases. And, associated inter-dependencies on third-party applications further led to outage of systems. Multiple and disparate applications were being used for similar business process.

As a result, the O&G supermajor saw their productivity decline as users were spending considerable time only transferring data across various subsurface applications. It was either very difficult or not possible to produce integrated products by using data that covered various domains – wells, seismic, surfaces. In addition, there were hardly any collaborate tools for the users.

Solution
After examining the complexities and gaps in the O&G supermajor’s existing applications and processes, Wipro proposed Platform-as-a-Service model to help transform their Business Process workflows. The aim was to reduce redundancies as well as standardize practices and application stack. 

The solution included:

• Business Benefit Realization, stakeholder mapping and business analysis of workflows
• An upgrade to Petrel, a modern and efficient platform that enables standardized and integrated multi-disciplinary workflows and data capture for exploration and production
• Back office infrastructure refresh with new servers and storage solutions (RHEV, NetApps etc.)
• Data transformation from OpenWorks in the “Data Migration Factory” to be Studio compatible (Petrel Studio environment improves productivity by creating a collaborative environment for knowledge sharing)
• Secondary Data Migration
• Handrails, a new tool for standardized business processes
• Innovative plug-ins that allow niche product developers to produce specialist tools or streamline workflows by connecting to any data source
• Seamless/integrated release roadmap across the 70-plus applications, adapters and plugins, involving multiple third-party vendors

Business Impact
The Platform-as-a-Service model helped the O&G supermajor reduce costs by 30% over a period of 18 months.

Key benefits delivered:

• A Geoscience Platform was deployed across 17 regional sites, targeting over 1300 users
• 2 major releases and 3 minor releases for the platform completed in just 18 months – a first in the Upstream industry in terms of scale and agility
• Platform deployment on schedule and below budget – about $100 million less than the projected cost
• Up to 30% improvement in end-user productivity; 35% improvement in application performance
• Achieved 40% reduction in operating expenses
• 569 servers decommissioned, 445 TB of OpenWorks data migrated to Petrel
• Created a Platform Delivery Service that enabled future proofing of Petrel upgrades in client environment
• Access to industry leading development framework through Ocean SDK