People, the real energy in oil and gas
If faced with the challenge, could you double your company's production or refining capacity with half the staff? It would mean big trouble for companies that use traditional approaches. The only way to meet the challenge head on is to make staff significantly more capable and productive. This scenario may seem extreme; however, recent trends indicate that the industry will face some version of this equation in the not-so-distant future.
No matter the variables in your equation, how do you go about significantly increasing staff capabilities and productivity to capitalize on business opportunities...or even meet challenges like this? Build a people-ready business. This is a business that enables three foundational capabilities:
1. | Ensures that employees have the right information to make the best decisions at the right time to capitalize on the top business opportunities; |
2. | Enables people to easily connect with others to drive innovation—internally, among partners, clients, vendors and others; and |
3. | Creates the ability for people to search for others with the right expertise and experience needed to make the best decisions. |
Microsoft envisions an oil and gas industry with individuals and teams who can confidently attack the toughest business challenges. It envisions an industry with a comprehensive, integrated enterprise-capable platform across the industry value chain. From this platform, oil and gas companies and their people can better seize business opportunities, improve predictability and compete under dynamic business conditions.
Microsoft is tightly aligned with a community of industry partners that is investing in solution portfolios that address and enrich this vision for people-ready business. This rich partner ecosystem includes systems integrators and oil and gas software providers such as Accenture, AspenTech, HP, Invensys, OSIsoft, SAT Corporation, Schlumberger Information Solutions and others. By using Microsoft .NET 3.0 and accompanying technologies that deliver and manage workflow, these partners better focus on delivering innovation and accelerating time to market with new solutions that have a dramatic effect on the industry's ability to find, use and share information—all high on everyone's agenda in the oil patch.
Ask yourself these questions. Can a geologist, operations engineer and finance specialist easily share live data to make a field development decision? Can a petroleum engineer transfer from Brazil to Bahrain and start work straight away? Does a human resources planner really know all employees' skill sets? The answers are 'yes' in a people-ready business. Most oil and gas operators and supply companies admit there is room for improvement in these areas.
People drive business outcomes
One of the industry's top challenges is effectively working with others across geographic and corporate boundaries. To make collaboration even more effective, especially considering scarce resources and the diversity of today's workforce, individuals and teams can locate the right expert based on their expertise and experience. Therefore, a refining expert on assignment in Singapore can lend real-time expertise on a project in Germany, and an engineer in Houston can collaborate with an engineer in Nigeria to solve a problem with which he or she already has experience.
Also in the people-ready business, engineers, geoscientists and others can have confidence in the data they have collected from various sources. They already know that the seismic information is accurate, the asset data is current and the payable system is trustworthy. Systems accurately and securely correlate data from many different origination points before the user accesses it, creating a single version of the truth.
On a different dimension, the people-ready business also creates an environment where new assets and work processes—from a variety of sources—can quickly be assimilated following major events or milestones such as mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and new plays that companies may undertake. The result is fewer operational delays and interruptions and smoother transitions for those whose work is affected.
It's not as difficult as it seems
Many oil and gas decision makers believe that empowering their workforce is more difficult than it is. For some time now, tools and processes have been built into Microsoft and partner products and solutions and proven to allow migration to a people-ready business to happen quickly and seamlessly. There is no need to exist in a paradigm because of fear of change or simply believing that the ability to move forward does not exist. The ability to build a people-ready business exists today and will amplify the impact of people in oil and gas.
