Collaboration to slash 20% costs at Kvaerner

Kværner Oilfield Products (KOP) expects to save at least 20% of engineering costs by installing £1 million worth of web-based product lifecycle management (PLM) systems globally. Being phased in this year, its system will integrate multiple departmental and site databases to create a single world-wide engineering data, documents and models repository, enabling huge time savings through instant online access, as well as rationalisation and re-use of designs, drawings and components. KOP, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas engineering contractors, manufacturing colossally expensive sub-sea systems for oil extraction, is a £400 million company with facilities in Norway, England, Scotland, Brazil, Australia and America. Part of the Aker Kvaerner group, it’s responsible for everything from conceptual design, to building, delivering and commissioning highly engineered, complex assemblies like the so-called ‘Christmas trees’ (sub sea well head valve gear that manages hydrocarbon and injection fluid flows), control systems, umbilicals and oil production risers. The firm recently reorganised into centres of excellence, with Houston, for example, now building Christmas trees. Some 70% of its manufacture – everything critical – is in-house; the rest is subcontract work involving certified suppliers around the world. Project cycles are from six to 18 months and costs are typically measured in millions – a single Christmas tree can be $750,000 to $1,500,000. Around 80% of its work is engineering design and installation, the balance being on-site operation and maintenance services, although the latter is currently growing. So far so good. But as oil reserves are sought in ever more difficult locations, economic sub-sea oil production is demanding continuous engineering innovation. Additionally, there’s increasing emphasis on ongoing modifications as conditions change over oilfields’ typically 20 to 30 year lifetimes. As a result, providing access to the vast amount of product design data, as-built data, as-maintained data, supply chain information and ERP business data, as well as managing change control and engineering drawing review fast enough, has become a considerable challenge. KOP vice president of project and engineering Morten Bråss says that to date managing this has been essentially paper-based. All project elements (from feasibility studies to individual assembly build) have been treated individually and run on separate local and functional databases for document management, engineering design, ERP and materials and manufacturing management, as well as supply chain management. Interaction was via the document control department. “Because we are constantly revisiting and modifying our designs, the retrieval and updating of files was difficult to manage,” says Bråss. And he makes the point that while local management of the existing databases remains key, the firm needed real time, globally accessible secure data sharing across departments and sites, and new, faster electronic management processes. “We also wanted engineering data to work alongside our other business information,” he says. “We had all these systems creating supposed knowledge, but they weren’t talking to each other. A piece of the jigsaw was missing… Every project is individual, but it’s fair to say that there was a lot more scope for global sharing of information and standardisation than was possible.” And he adds that increasingly, operations and maintenance also need access to legacy information. Instant world-wide access The new distributed PLM system, from SmarTeam, will be deployed globally and take control of all engineering metadata, linking and synchronising all the databases via servers at all KOP’s sites. Information will be mirrored across the site servers using daily batch and real time on-demand updates, covering everything from BoMs (bills of materials) to CAD stress analysis reports, design and drawing changes, service history updates and so on. Access will be via KOP’s internal LANs and global WANs, as well as via the web where required, or downloads to laptops for use offshore. At all times, SmarTeam will prevent conflicts by locking out and highlighting information subject to current change. It’s a first for SmarTeam in big time oil and gas, but not in complex, global engineering – one recent automotive project involved nine databases and locations with similar issues. KOP selected the software after what Bråss describes as detailed and long term evaluations, also involving EDS Metaphase (now TeamCentre) and MatrixOne’s eMatrix. Beyond the obvious price and integration considerations – to the databases but also its global SolidWorks MCAD and Autodesk ECAD and its spread of ERP systems (JD Edwards, SAP and Multi+) – a key criterion was user-friendliness. “It needed to be intuitive and easy to find information for everyone,” says Bråss, pointing out that ultimately there will be around 1,000 users – way beyond those involved with project design and manufacture. SmarTeam fitted the bill, he says, because it runs in the Windows environment from within users’ own applications, with pull-down menus taking them straight to role-based secure information. Bråss expects the result to be easy training and rapid uptake. Beyond all that, KOP needed the system to be simple to change, for example in terms of adapting workflows and the data model itself. Chris Jones, president of European Operations at SmarTeam, says that’s one of the system’s features. “It’s very easy: it’s just a matter of dragging and dropping icons to make or change links.” And he gives the example of component serialisation that KOP wanted to change from the standard provided – which took 40 minutes! In operation, the system will enable all cycles, from engineering document review, to order management and build clarification, right out to the big one – consolidated engineering proposals document transmittal for customer approval – to be managed electronically. The system will handle all updates and data association, pulling and pushing information, managing omissions and ongoing work and checking everything in and out. Bråss expects benefits at every stage, from global collaboration on project bids, to their subsequent execution, operation and maintenance. They will also extend to all departments, from sales managing quotes and documentation, to engineering, publishing, manufacturing and the rest. “Some returns are quantifiable, some are not,” he says. “Everyone will be able to find information – drawings, documents, engineering data – far more quickly … If something happens offshore, time is money and information is needed fast.” Benefits set to spread Internally, it’s about time savings and improved accuracy – and automatically satisfying the ERP systems’ information requirements in terms of materials, purchasing and subcontractor management. And Bråss adds that design re-use and rationalisation, for example of specialist valves (allowing modification and configuration instead of ground-up development) will also be big wins. “Effectively, we’ll be able to save whole 3D models at a macro level and at a micro level all the way through their evolution,” he says. And that’s a very powerful starting place for standardisation. As for the project itself, implementation started in October, and the first milestone is 1 March when KOP expects to have gone live on document control for some 100 users working on Dalia, a huge deep-sea oilfield project in Angola, West Africa, for Total Fina Elf. By then SmarTeam should hold the full data model, consolidating engineering work from around KOP’s global sites. “It will be a good test,” says Bråss, and next up in Norway will be workflow, followed at the end of the year by integration with KOP’s Multi+ ERP system in Oslo – although around the world, KOP sites are phasing installation as suits them. And if successful, the likelihood is that KOP’s implementation will be followed by a roll out to the rest of Aker Kværner. Bråss says that the KPO project is effectively a pilot and that the parent company is “closely monitoring” its progress.