StatoilHydro, Norway

A Quantum Leap

Successful e-business relies on managed and controlled plant engineering information.

StatoilHydro and Intergraph have established a close e-engineering business partnership to address the access, management and administration of technical plant and refinery information.

This partnership formed a joint integrated team to develop and implement a web-enabled, standards-based Plant Information Management - Integrated Project Execution (PIM-IPE) data warehouse to hold all technical engineering and as-built data for the Åsgard Offshore Engineering Project.

This data warehouse is based on Intergraph’s SmartPlant® Foundation plant management software and its extensive portfolio of e-engineering applications for creating, browsing and maintaining plant data. Successful e-business relies on this managed and controlled information.

StatoilHydro’s objective for the data warehouse was to collect and store all the plant engineering and as-built data, 80 percent of which was technical, for reuse throughout the long commissioning, operations and maintenance life cycle. By doing this, the company has addressed several important business objectives:

shorten the time to first oil and gas refinery production
introduce improved work processes across the value chain via a common Web portal
increase plant efficiency
maintain operating licenses, safe operation and health, safety and environmental compliance
shorten costly shutdowns for plant maintenance and repairs
reduce the spare equipment inventory
reduce data handover costs from contractors and suppliers
assure data longevity and reuse for the entire life of the plant
integrate technical data with other business systems

SmartPlant Foundation is the data management core of the PIM solution. It adopts a standard format for data representation, and this facilitates the sharing and exchange of information among many applications and users.

PIM was successfully used in the plant commissioning and operations phases. As-built data is loaded, and the data handover process is affected simply by introducing new people to the PIM solution. Usage has expanded rapidly among the refinery operations staff, as well as among external equipment suppliers and contractors. StatoilHydro plans to start using the Åsgard PIM solution as best practice in future plant operations projects.

StatoilHydro exceeded the original goal of gaining payback on the PIM investment within two years. PIM functionality has been expanded more than threefold, within the same budget. They attribute all these achievements to the excellent collaboration in the project among StatoilHydro, Intergraph, contractor Kværner Oil & Gas (now called Aker Solutions) and equipment suppliers. Another contributing factor was the huge quality improvement in the data. They are also confident there will be further large benefits during the 30-year plant operations and maintenance phase.

These achievements represent a world-class, quantum leap in plant information management.

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