Asset Information Management (AIM) should be a key topic for any company that is serious about improving its Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM). While many products address key portions of the AIM challenge, there are still no complete, comprehensive AIM solutions on the market. Organizations that want to improve their situation will need to weave together a solution from a set of information management capabilities that address different aspects of the problem. BP was faced with disparate sets of technical practice standards that were inherited from a wave of acquisitions in the late 1990s. This report discusses the processes and software solutions they used to unify and improve the maintenance and revision of these standards.
Engineering Technical Practices
Management at BP
By Clint Reiser
Keywords
Technical Practices, Document Management, AIM, Documentum
Overview
Asset Information Management (AIM) should be a key concern for any company that is serious about improving its Asset Lifecycle Management (ALM). Organizations need an enormous amount of information about their assets to ef-fectively operate and maintain them. This information comes in a wide variety of informa-tion types, like documents, drawings, 3D models, data tables, etc. and is used by a broad base of stakeholders across the full asset life-cycle. It must be complete, comprehensive, accurate, consistent and timely to ensure that everyone makes appropriate decisions and this dictates the need for a proper set of AIM processes supported by an appropriate set of IT technology solutions.
Most of the IT solutions used in the design, build, operation and maintenance of facilities already provide good AIM support documents for their target set of information and stake-holders. However, there is no one product on the market today that addresses the entire AIM issue. Organizations need to understand this situation and develop strate-gies that integrate individual solution capabilities into one IT environment that provides full coverage.
Documentum was selected as the platform for the technical document management system. BP chose to build a user-friendly custom solution on top of Documentum to meet their workflow requirements.
Document management is a fundamental AIM issue. It can be addressed in many different ways and is therefore a good place to start in developing an AIM strategy. This case study discusses an approach that BP used to gain better control of the documents that they use to manage and communicate their engineering technical practice standards.
Centralization at BP Improves Corporate Learning
In the late 1990s, BP acquired a number of companies, including ARCO, Amoco, and Castrol. Each company brought its own set of engineering technical practice standards to the BP organization. This was both a source of inconsistency and a barrier to knowledge sharing across the company. In 2001, BP initiated a project to address this issue by merging the disparate standards from the heritage companies into one central set of engineering standards. BP created a central department, Engineering Technical Practic-es (ETP), to create and maintain BP engineering practicPractic-es for both the exploration and production segments of the corporation.
In the context of this initiative, BP's technical documen-tation comprised the standard practices related to the design, purchase, commissioning, installation, and in-spection of equipment throughout BP. The documents would be authored and owned by designated subject matter experts (SMEs) from the various discipline cate-gories (instrumentation, valves, etc.) within the corporation. Once authored and published, more than 10,000 BP technical people, primarily engineers and field technicians, would have access to the documents.
ETP Library Unites Documents and Workflow
The ETP department set out to develop a technical document management system to manage the ETP documents and enable the associated processes. Documentum was currently in place at BP as the corporate enterprise con-tent management platform. Since the company knew this to be a flexible, easy-to-customize platform, they also chose it as the platform for the tech-nical document management system. However, additional functionality was required to meet the workflow needs for the initiative. Since BP could not identify an existing out-of-the-box application that provided this func-tionality, they decided to meet the unsatisfied requirements by building a
The ETP department was looking to complement the Library with the ability to facilitate collaboration among its users. This was achieved through the customization of their current Lotus Domino solution and integration with the ETP Library.
custom solution on top of Documentum. BP would later call this custom solution the "ETP Library."
The ETP Library was designed to provide 10,000 BP employees and exter-nal consultants with access to the system. The library provided a user-friendly interface to assure widespread adoption. Metadata, such as docu-ment number, key words, title, and taxonomy category, were coupled with the documents. This provided users with multiple search options and the ability to navigate via the taxonomy by which the documents had been stored.
Corporate level documents in the ETP Library were accompanied by doc-uments containing local practice variations added to reflect local regulations. For example, if a department at a specific location needed to purchase a heat exchanger, users at the location could access both the cor-porate document and the local document that included process exceptions as required by the local government. The system simplified the manage-ment of location-specific documanage-ments by limiting visibility to users at the respective locations.
ETP Shared Learnings Enables Continuous Improvement through Collaboration
The ETP Library provided a system for centrally managing the documents. However, the ETP initiative also required a process that would enable users and authors to continuously improve the documentation. This required the ability to capture questions on content and suggestions for improvement and modifications from document users. It also required a mechanism by which these questions and comments could be reviewed, validated, and eventually made visible for reference, along with the affiliated technical documents. This integrated presentation provided additional value to the initiative through improved visibility into discussions and sug-gestions surrounding the official practices.
BP chose to leverage the collaboration capabilities of its existing Lotus Do-mino application to address these document- related communication needs. Only minimal customization was required. The process involved cloning of the existing solution, minimal extension of functionality, and integration with the ETP Library. The new resulting solution, "ETP Shared Learnings,"
The result of the initiative was a set of processes and tools that provide a valuable framework for the management and continual improvement of technical practice documentation at BP.
utilized the same taxonomy as the Library, enabling the association of shared learnings with the relevant official documentation.
When the integration was completed, users would access the technical practices document of interest. The users were able to add confidential comments in ETP Shared Learnings to open a dialog with the subject matter experts. The subject matter experts would review and validate the comments and sug-gestions. Once validated, these comments and suggestions would be made visible as "shared learnings" to users in a pane adjacent to the associated technical document. Periodically, the shared learnings would be added to an updated version of the official document and simultaneously removed from the shared learnings area. As this process repeated itself, the shared learnings area would once again serve as a vehicle for future document re-visions. The end-to-end process and the supporting technology have provided a valuable framework for managing and continually improving technical practices and the associated documentation at BP.
Last Word
Engineering technical practices is a good example of the kinds of document management challenges that are fundamental across ALM. In this case study, BP developed a good set of processes for managing the lifecycle of its technical documentation. BP enabled these processes using an IT solu-tion that leveraged existing investments in document management and collaboration infrastructure. While, at the time, BP had to augment their solution capabilities with custom code, more modern versions of these kinds of infrastructure components have considerably more built-in capa-bility to meet specific requirements. The workflow support tools included in modern platforms would also ease the development of any custom code that might still be needed to support specific processes for management of change and lessons learned.
Future ARC reports will present case studies of how other companies are addressing various AIM issues, outlining their challenge, the approach they chose, and the results of each initiative. ARC intends for this collection of reports to provide our clients with a valuable frame of reference for their own internal process improvement initiatives. We welcome your feedback on which AIM issues we should be addressing and would also like to hear
about your success stories around AIM, particularly ones that you would be willing to share with the ARC ALM community.
For further information or to provide feedback on this Insight, please contact your account manager or the author at [email protected]. ARC Insights are pub-lished and copyrighted by ARC Advisory Group. The information is proprietary to ARC and no part of it may be reproduced without prior permission from ARC.
