AGR Upstream, Asia Pacific

AGR Asia Pacific is an Australian and Asian integrated oil and gas service provider. AGR-AP manage, engineer and service offshore and onshore oil and gas production facilities throughout their life cycle. From exploration and appraisal drilling, through to full field development, production and final abandonment.

AGR specialise in assisting oil companies with low cost, fast track commercialisation of hydrocarbon resources using leading edge technologies and world class processes.

Background

Necessity truly was the mother of invention at AGR Upstream Petroleum, a natural resource exploration firm that last year found itself needing a way to co-ordinate a AU$100 million ship refit involving nearly 40 subcontractors in three countries.

Projects for the company include both onshore and offshore Australian sites, as well as sites in India, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.

In the past, Upstream had managed such projects via e-mail, with new versions of drawings, schematics and other large documents regularly forwarded between team members separated by large distances. This approach, while more or less effective, introduced countless delays and retransmission efforts because of the sheer volume of information being pushed through the e-mails.

“You’re in a situation where you go through one design, have got to make modifications, then have to reissue the drawings and get everybody up to speed,” says IT manager Ivan Prescott. “We’re talking about 30,000 drawings to be sent to 30 or 40 people, and it was silly to try and put this stuff out over the e-mail. We needed to collaborate in a managed way.”

Upstream faced financial motivators as well as practical ones: with the company wearing nearly AU$1 million in lost revenue for each day the ship was away from its normal home in the Bass Strait, it was essential that the risk of delays be eliminated as much as possible.

Having identified a potential problem area early on, Upstream began discussions with long-time web design and web development partner Newpath WEB about ways to address it through the use of technology.

Solution

By embracing custom web and application development rather than off-the-shelf applications, Newpath WEB was able to spec out and build an online document exchange solution that would provide a common repository for Upstream’s documents.

Designed and built with a custom Web interface and MySQL database backend, the new exchange was fast-tracked and completed within just three weeks. “Normally, says Prescott, developing, testing and refining such a significant project would have taken up to three months”.

Hosted from Newpath WEB hosting facilities, the document exchange was put through heavy usage during the course of the project, which ran through the second half of 2006 and involved the regular transmission of many gigabytes of data. Rapid turnaround in the delivery of the system proved incredibly valuable for Upstream.

The company began using the system from the beginning of the six-month refit, and it quickly proved popular with all parties concerned — including no fewer than five subcontractors in Singapore and four more in other countries.

“Newpath WEB were able to provide us with something that would fit in with our public Web site (which was also designed and developed by Newpath WEB),” says Prescott, “and allow a secure login to a backend where all parties concerned could upload and download documents very, very quickly. Documents were available within minutes of being uploaded, rather than sending our very large files via e-mail and having the delays associated with that.”

One of the most valuable parts of Upstream’s new content management system was that it not only enabled upload and download of project documents, but also tied in with the broader scope of work that Newpath WEB was also performing for the company. This included a fully featured Website, with everything from corporate policies and organisation charts to information on procurement, vacant positions, system processes and other corporate information.

Newpath WEB built the entire site around an easy to use editing tool that let employees update the Websites quickly and easily. Building on the site, the company has also developed tools such as an e-mail signature generator, which produces consistent employee e-mail signatures according to a single common style. Another development included a job ad generator, which integrates with Upstream’s career management system to automatically extract and format job-wanted ads as HTML code for publication on third-party employment sites.

Online Marketing, specifically SEO & SEM was also an element that was included in the project, with results producing an increase in traffic by 1500% to the site within the first 3 months.

Result

Having taken the company from a manual and inefficient email based method of collaboration to full online publishing and document sharing in just a short while, AGR is predictably enthused about the results of project and the long-term benefits it will deliver to the company.

“We were able to get the whole thing up and operational without too much hassle, and had full collaboration via our Website,” Ivan says. “It was a job well done, saved us an enormous amount of money and has already paid for itself many, many times.”

Such innovations have helped Upstream greatly improve employee participation in the online conveyance of information. And, given its massive success in saving time and money on the Crystellation refit, the system is now being considered for a broader use within the company, with plans to roll the application in with its own Microsoft SharePoint Server environment, developing it for use by partners and other subsidiaries worldwide.

For further information, please visit:

www.agr-ap.com or www.newpathweb.com

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