INTEGRATED OPERATIONS BEST PRACTICES NEEDED BY INDIAN UPSTREAM ENERGY COMPANIES

The Upstream Energy business, in one sense, is a simple business with every operating company dealing with large amounts of information data confined to various boundaries and thus generating complexity for smarter decision making. Globally for almost a decade, Integrated Operation (IO) has been a known solution to develop an analytics based intelligent online (or near real time) system connecting decision makers to the work processes, existing software applications and the historians. Many global companies have focused very well on IO Enterprise Solution and proved its benefits to the rest of the world. But Indian upstream companies are still not able to reap the real benefits in spite of their plans to adopt IO. In this paper, author is analyzing top India upstream companies at conceptual level for various barriers in such adoption of IO Enterprise Solution as compared to some International Oil Companies (IOC's). All leading upstream companies in India, which already have a level of instrumentation as compared to other industries without any data sharing across the organization, are highly dependent on human interpretation making it difficult to optimize various resources in an integrated and timely manner. This paper analyses the specific business areas for data integration and analytics in order to build a smarter organization with focus on multi-billion dollar payoffs over the next decade of operations (Munier et al, 2008). IO Enterprise Solution involves monitoring Energy facilities by having an instrumented, interconnected and intelligent framework across the value chain. By combining workflow information and decision support tools with active near real time dashboards, both planned and unplanne shutdowns can be reduced while maximizing money, time and manpower available at hand. The degree to which it can happen will depend on the vision of the Operating Company's leaders. Enterprise Collaboration is the key for the companies where IT vendors, strategic business partners and academicians shall be able to provide that support to drive more “smartness” into the organization. And this paper shall share that model blueprint.