Microsoft Project Server:Improving Safety and Productivity for the Oil Industry

Agenda• Background• The Problem – Rig & Frac Core Scheduling• The Impact – Safety & Productivity• The Solution – More Accurate Geospatial Scheduling• Putting It Together• The Result – Same Production Levels with Fewer Resources

Background:An American Oil Company sought new approaches to improving upstream oil production processes in the hope of increasing throughput, reducing costs or in other ways impacting the upstream business positively.

• Alpha Problem – Pre-Production Efficiency• The former process for scheduling Drilling Rigs & Hydraulic Fracking Rigs by

location within a lease area involved review of current rig reporting data updated nightly and maintaining plans manually to maximize active use of drilling assets and minimize transportation time between activity areas

• Beta Problem - Safety• The former process for scheduling required significant meticulous review of

geolocation of fracking and drilling to ensure minimum safe distance between activities in the pre-production lifecycle

The Problem

• Pre-Production Efficiency• Manual scheduling limits the efficiency of the scheduling process and reduces

the opportunity to analyze the effectiveness of assets and lease-holdings

• Safety• Given the large scale of scheduling activities (10,000+ activities per

geographic area), the ability to concentrate sufficiently on safety of scheduled activities is significantly impacted by the size of the problem set.

The Impact

• Scheduling• All drilling rigs & frac cores scheduled in Project Professional – resulting project schedule data uploaded to

Project Server

• Data Transformation• Data captured on rig performance and activity completion exported from external database & transformed into

data points in Project Professional using VBA macros

• Replanning• Assessment of planned activities leads to replanning in Project Professional – resulting replanned schedule data

uploaded to Project Server

• Reporting• Schedule planning, completion and current activity data as well as geolocation data maintained in Project Server

and exported to reports

• Decision Support / Data Analysis• Reports derived include rig efficiency charts, current capacity & projected capacity charts, safety analysis

heatmaps scalable against time phase

The Solution

Putting It TogetherOverall the solution leverages Oracle, MS SQL Server, Project Professional, Project Server, custom VBA, custom SQL Queries in Oracle and MS SQL.

Outcomes:As a result of the implementation of Project Server, Project Professional and the use of SQL Spatial Data capabilities, the oil company achieved multiple significant impacts:• Reduction of rig count including removal of an underperforming asset from the field• Early identification of unsafe drill rig & frac core placements supporting risk mitigation• Maintaining existing production goals while reducing cost of production through increased efficiency

Proximity Detection

Activity Scheduling

Schedule Performance