Equinor is an international energy company with more than 21,000 employees and present in 30 countries worldwide. To optimize existing complex business processes in support of its transition to a broad energy company, it established a Microsoft Power Platform Center for Enablement to nurture greater innovation through low-code development.
“Power Platform’s low-code technology fosters better innovative relationships between business experts and IT experts and avoids the ‘shadow IT’ pitfall many organizations operate within.”
Per Kåre Foss, Vice President Enterprise Infrastructure Platforms, Equinor
Equinor is committed to providing affordable energy for societies worldwide while taking a leading role in transitioning to more environmentally conscious solutions. As the leading operator on the Norwegian continental shelf with substantial international activities, Equinor is engaged in exploration, development, and production of oil and gas, wind power and solar power, and low carbon solutions.
The company is on a journey to net-zero emissions through optimizing its oil and gas portfolio, accelerating growth in renewables, and pioneering developments in carbon capture and hydrogen. Moving to renewable energy requires significant changes in operations, and the company's enterprise infrastructure platforms (EIP) leadership is responsible for enabling this transition with digital solutions that support emerging business processes.
That's why technology leadership at Equinor was looking for ways to enable rapid development of enterprise-level solutions that would deliver immediate business value. They were also keen to alleviate challenges around some of Equinor's complex systems and user interfaces (UI) to provide a simplified user experience for employees and contractors.
Digitally streamlining the company's systems and its associated business processes would improve the user experience while also increasing efficiency and reducing costs for the company. The company envisioned a way to empower Equinor employees to create these digital solutions in their domains but knew it needed a proper governance model in place to maintain security and ensure solution lifecycle management.
Fostering innovation through employee empowerment
As a part of Equinor's digital transformation efforts, its low-code journey began in part with strong internal usage and reception of Microsoft Power BI starting in 2016. Continuing this journey, former Chief Engineer IT, Knut Erik Hollund, wanted to explore the potential of Microsoft Power Platform. In 2020, he set up a small governance team and became the first product owner for the platform.
During this time, Per Kåre Foss, VP of Enterprise Infrastructure Platforms at Equinor, also saw Power Platform as a fitting tool because of its reputation for enabling low-code citizen development and its customizable governance model. These capabilities would empower the company's 21,000-plus employees of all skill levels to develop a range of solutions with small user groups as well as enterprise-level user groups—all with necessary security parameters in place.
After seeing thousands of apps being made by Equinor employees, the Equinor IT organization realized the company needed a more formalized governance around Power Platform solutions to support sustainable and secure growth of internally developed solutions. The Equinor IT organization tasked two experienced employees from Equinor's technology, digitalization, and innovation business unit—with support from Bouvet (a Norwegian consultancy company)—to design and organize a Power Platform citizen development governance model the company calls its Center for Enablement (CfE).
One of those early adopters and avid users of Power BI was Rebecca Brekke, Center for Enablement Task Lead at Equinor. Rebecca’s role focuses primarily on growing citizen developers' competence and engagement with Power Platform and leverages her IT and data visualization background.
Leading the company's center for enablement initiatives along with Rebecca is Espen Norevik, Center for Enablement Task Lead and Product Owner at Equinor. Espen’s role focuses on governance and strategies for Equinor's citizen development initiatives, and he previously was a leader in Equinor's DigiTEAM unit—a unit founded from exploring what engineers can do with low-code tools such as Power Platform.
As such, DigiTEAM members often have engineering backgrounds and typically have high levels of expertise on the company's internal operations. Part of Equinor's low-code development strategy is to train engineers on Power Platform who have interest in improving business processes and place them on a DigiTEAM dedicated to a business unit. Rather than hiring professional developers and training them on Equinor's operations, this approach saves the company time and money while empowering and promoting its employees and contractors.
Hans Martin Berge, DigiTEAM Task Lead in Equinor’s Global Operations Technology unit, is one of the first leaders within the DigiTEAM department. He says, “Using Power Platform has bridged the gap between IT and engineers at Equinor. We have greater capability to create business solutions ourselves, but also to collaborate with IT for creating enterprise-level solutions facilitated by the Center for Enablement model.”
Building trust with low-code citizen development governance model
In June 2021, Rebecca and Espen started their efforts to establish Equinor's Power Platform Center for Enablement utilizing the Microsoft Center of Excellence Starter Kit as a framework to customize. They drew inspiration from the kit but found most value in the monitoring reports that track app usage levels to ensure proper governance is being applied for enterprise-level solutions. In August 2021, the team announced the CfE rollout to internal Power Platform users.
The CfE development team took a blended approach to centralize and decentralize different components of the company's citizen development model. Equinor's five DigiTEAMs and numerous certified citizen developers are decentralized so they can be tasked across the entire company based on solution development needs, which often takes a fusion team and co-development approach with IT.
The adoption leads are the link between decentralized citizen development activities (creating and delivering solutions) and centralized governance, competence, and engagement components. The adoption leads monitor solutions under development to ensure they function within the operating model, identify scalable deliveries, and help develop strong use case stories to spread awareness and drive adoption. Additionally, DigiTEAMs partner with adoption leads to inform CfE best practices based on their experience.
“Getting adoption from Equinor’s various business units to use citizen development in their operating models is top priority,” says Espen. “Power Platform’s ease of use enables our makers to deliver rapid and impactful business value.”
The governance category includes an established operating model, defines CfE platform strategy, provides security and support for Power Platform developers, and has administrative oversight on compliance.
Equinor uses a Power Apps application for makers to register solutions once ready, which helps ensure compliance and correct zone categorization based on app usage. The company uses the following Power Platform zoning model to categorize roles and responsibilities and differentiate between processes. It also defines which environments users can develop in and the related policies.
Green Zone: Digital Citizens (all employees) can create solutions for personal productivity or for user groups of fewer than five people. Certification is not required, but training is available.
Yellow Zone: Citizen Developers can create solutions for personal and team productivity; requires certification through the CfE.
Red Zone: DigiTEAM/TDI IT Developers can create solutions meant for a bigger audience (production application), critical for the company or containing sensitive data. This role requires certification at the CfE level as well as Equinor IT certification.
The competence category organizes and supports Power Platform onboarding and certification, best practice guidance, and learning opportunities for users—all accessed through Equinor's Center for Enablement hub. The Power Platform developer certification process is a 14-hour course with two hours of onboarding related to internal Equinor topics and 12 hours of hands-on Power Platform training.
Lastly, the engagement category focuses on promoting Power Platform success stories and community building amongst Power Platform users. Equinor's Citizen Development hub is hosted via SharePoint Online and showcases many resources that educate users on what citizen development is, the different paths of solution creation they can take based on their interest, as well as specific communities for Power Apps, Power BI, and more. It also provides paths for developers to get support with creating, refining, and scaling their solutions.
“The Center for Enablement model addressed management concerns that citizen development lacked control,” says Rebecca. “The business impact and benefits of the resulting Power Platform solutions truly speak for themselves, so our focus is to promote them effectively.”
Equinor’s CfE efforts have yielded several use cases, two of which addressed business process challenges in the logistics and supply chain area of the company.
Crane and Lifting App
The process of requesting crane lifts offshore has historically been ad hoc and decentralized. Requests come via email using Excel or SharePoint lists, and even via phone calls and handwritten notes. Svein Inge Heggøy, Discipline Responsible Logistics and crane operator at Equinor, wanted a way to facilitate and standardize the crane lift request process to make it easier and more transparent for the logistics department to have oversight on all requests.
With no previous Power Platform experience, Svein Inge created a Power Apps app that allows internal and external users to easily make crane lift requests. The solution enables real-time collaboration in Microsoft Teams and gives the logistics department oversight of all requested crane lifts, and operators can see which ones are top priority.
The first iteration, developed by Svein Inge, took a week to make in parallel with his day-to-day work; he did his own testing and opened it to users for Troll B, his crane-operating location. The app was so well received that demand increased and the DigiTEAM helped Svein Inge scale his solution to deploy to all offshore installations across Equinor.
Hans Martin Berge, DigiTEAM Task Lead, partnered with Svein Inge to integrate Dataverse and replace SharePoint for data storage so it could be scaled and deployed to other Equinor installations. They also added user preference settings, such as defaulting to preferred plant location.
Now, crane lift operations run more efficiently and effectively with a centralized tool to manage requests, which also gives Equinor vendors and employees a streamlined experience. Today it is the sixth-most used Power Apps solution in Equinor at 809 users.
OCTG Dashboard
A remote plant in Norway handles the majority of Equinor’s offshore piping overseen by the Oil Country Tubular Goods (OCTG) supply chain and logistics team. Managing the tubular goods is tedious and time-consuming—it involves manually counting entire truckloads of piping and categorizing each individual pipe by length and type. Stein Harald Sundal, a senior planner at Equinor, discovered through online research the capabilities of AI Builder in Power Apps and developed a solution to increase efficiency and automation of counting tubular goods.
Now, to count tubular goods, Stein Harald uses a Power Apps app on a hand-held device to take photos of physical tubular goods. The solution uses AI Builder in Power Apps and automatically counts each pipe enabled by the object detection component and catalogues the data in Dataverse with the form processor component. Stein Harald created this solution with relative ease and no previous coding knowledge, and soon the entire OCTG team was using the application.
After seeing the possibilities with Power Platform, Stein Harald recognized an opportunity to solve for greater supply chain and logistics challenges by expanding the solution. At the time, Equinor’s OCTG Logistic Center operations were decentralized in Excel and SharePoint documents that were siloed with each individual planner. Although planners had control within their areas of oversight, the fact that there was little information-sharing led to missed opportunities for operating and planning more efficiently. Stein Harald set out to centralize this critical data and transform it into business intelligence to help improve the process for handling tubular goods orders.
What started as a time-saving app for a single step in the tubular goods supply chain has evolved into the OCTG Dashboard—a centralized platform used to create, manage, report, and interact with orders related to tubular goods between multiple users and vendors accurately and in real time. Users create and maintain orders via a Power Apps app and communicate in real time with Teams. Power Automate sends email notifications for reminders on pending and delayed orders and confirmations that materials were picked up. The solution incorporates a Power BI dashboard that visualizes a large amount of data stored in Dataverse to identify logistical trends, risks, and areas for improvement.
“With Power Platform solutions, our OCTG supply chain and logistics planners can focus more time on value creation and data-driven decision-making rather than tedious administrative tasks,” says Stein Harald.
The evolved solution has increased cooperation and productivity, enhanced quality, and delivered standardization for the logistics center and supply chain management. Stein Harald is keen to make continuous improvements, including the addition of features and functionality based on demand within the logistics department.
Generating business value through Power Platform citizen developer solutions
Equinor’s Center for Enablement reports average monthly users increased from 5,000 to 13,000 for citizen-developed Power Apps solutions between August 2021 and April 2022 alone. This is directly correlated to when the CfE was established. Equinor currently has 37,000 premium Power Platform licenses and 247 production apps created with Power Platform.
Rebecca, Espen, and their team aim to increase the number of CfE-certified citizen developers from 35 to 300 in 2022. The forecasted value for delivered solution is estimated at more than 500 million NOK annually for DigiTEAM and citizen developer deliveries alone—not including corporate Power Platform projects delivered by IT.
Achieving greater sustainability with Power Platform and fusion development strategies
Going forward, the Center for Enablement is focused on solidifying citizen development as an established, formalized path within all operating models of Equinor by gaining even greater adoption of the CfE Power Platform model.
They will continue improving and expanding DigiTEAM operations as a part of Equinor’s low-code citizen development initiatives. Once the practice is mature enough, the Equinor IT organization aims to drive fusion development between citizen developers and professional developers combining low-code/high-code approaches to solve bigger business challenges.
“Power Platform’s low-code technology fosters better innovative relationships between business experts and IT experts and avoids the ‘shadow IT’ pitfall many organizations operate within,” says Per Kåre. “I envision it helping Equinor achieve its sustainability goals as it transitions into renewables by enabling IT to deliver solutions to new business areas much more quickly with ease of adoption and delivering significant value.”
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“Using Power Platform has bridged the gap between IT and engineers at Equinor. We have greater capability to create business solutions ourselves, but also to collaborate with IT for creating enterprise-level solutions facilitated by the Center for Enablement model.”
Hans Martin Berge, DigiTEAM Task Lead, Equinor
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