Integrated Operation Center: Success Journey Through Delivering Digital Workflow and Collaboration Transformations
Pannawat Nilkitsaranont, Reudej Kunyosying, Kosol Kingsarn, Thammarong Yongpittayapong, Teeroj Supphakijudomkarn, Suradech Kongkiatpaiboon
Offshore Technology Conference Asia (OTC Asia), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2024 · OTC-34959-MS
Three offshore processing hubs each had their own nearby control room, their own tools and their own way of working, which slowed optimization and kept teams in silos. The team used design thinking and agile sprints to plan and deliver a single onshore integrated operation center that runs all three sites remotely, with one shared set of digital tools and a single alert system. The paper shows that remote operation is now affordable, and that changing how people collaborate matters as much as moving the control room.
Key results
- Remote-control technology cut the cost of relocating the control rooms by about 20 times compared with a conventional hardware approach
- Data-driven maintenance planning cut 5-year preventive-maintenance work orders by 44% and material cost by 55%
- Overdue work orders fell significantly even with fewer staff, and the project was delivered without incidents or cyber-security breaches
- Teams reported better collaboration and psychological safety, which surfaced optimization ideas that had previously been missed
Approach
- Applied design thinking (site visits, user interviews, anonymous idea ranking by effort and value) and agile sprints to find and prioritize the main problems
- Moved panel operators, activity planners, marine control staff, supervisors and engineers from three offshore sites into one onshore control room about 400 km away, using remote-control technology
- Consolidated more than 10 separate optimization programs and spreadsheets into a single source of digital tools and one integrated exception-management system that tracks alert acknowledgement and response time
- Introduced daily face-to-face scrum meetings between operations and engineering, and moved preventive maintenance from time-based to condition-based using data-analytics software
- Secured the remote control-system link with a dedicated intranet network
The problem
Offshore production and optimization was split across separate on-site control rooms, which led to siloed decisions, duplicated digital tools, poor offshore-onshore communication and a large backlog of unprioritized maintenance work.
Tools & methods
Summary written for this site from the published paper. For figures, data and the full method, read the paper on OnePetro.