This Case Histories section provides the reader with an insight on how Proteus has been used by different Companies and Organisations, to help them solve particular problems and achieve much better working results.
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ConocoPhillips - Using Proteus as WEAC tool (Q1 2011 - present)
In close cooperation with Work Environment experts in ConocoPhillips, Promineo has developed a Proteus based solution that allows logging Work Environment data, as well as reference documentation, for each area of an intstallation.
The system is designed to collect "measurements" from the earliest engineering phase all through the life cycle of the installation (to Decommissioning).
The information gathered in the system will be of tremendous value over the years, since compliance with NORSOK can be easily documented at any time, and for each installation, and valuable statistical analyses can be made and used to "learn from experience".
ConocoPhillips have indicated that the want to use this solution for all their installations world-wide.
ConocoPhillips - Using Proteus for Integrated Planning (Q3 2010 - present)
ConocoPhillips uses SAS to aggregate and structure planning data. They have decidet to leverage this valuable data, by putting Proteus on top of it for, among other things, time-phased and hierarchical Gantt reports.
AkerSolutions - Kashagan Project (Q3 2009 - Q2 2011)
Aker Solutions in partnership with Saipem, have been awarded two contracts from Agip KCO, for the hook-up work of Phase I development of the Kashagan Field in the Caspian Sea. The total contract value for Aker Solutions portion of the two contracts is USD 1.6 billion. The work includes the offshore hook-up, commissioning assistance, onshore pre-fabrication, all logistic support and inshore hook-up work. Other contracts includes engineering and job carding for prefabrication and installation and vessels preparation.
Proteus was introduced to the Kashagan Project to address the following issues:
- Visualize (using "Proteus Completion Report") how job cards were held-up, due to material and/or design hold. Of special interest was the visualisation of which jobs were affected in a 6 week look-ahead time window. By color coding the various holds (Red = "Material Hold", Yellow = "Design Hold", Orange = "Both Material & Design Hold", and Green = "No Hold") it was very easy for the project teams to identiy which jobs where going to be problematic, if no proactive measures were taken.
- Show time-phased overview of planned and installed cables (meters per week)
- Show similar time-phase for spools and pipe-tests.
- Provide management with high level pivot reports, where aggregated value from detail level (cables, spools, pipetests, job-data) could be raised to discipline level. These reports can be easily created by Aker Solutions planning personnel on request from higher management, and provide an important basis for reporting to the project's main contractor.
- Create a custom export of planning and production data to an Excel template containing a topological overview over the physical plant, much like an aerial photo. The template contains 72 groups of (3 x 2 cells) where 6 numbers can be presented, and each group has an arrow pointing to the physical plant location. Proteus is now capable of populating this template with any are related data contained in the planning and/or production databases. This was preveiously done manually, requiring a large amount of time and effort.
A testimonial from the Project Management Team for the Kashagan Protject will be supplied here at a later date in Q2 2010.
Large Canadian energy company (delivered Q1 2010)
In close cooperation with Safran North America (SNA), a "Mission-Critical" solution was implemented for a large Canadian energy company (who wishes to keep their choice of strategic software a competitive secret and therefore remains unnamed here). The solution is based on an integration between Safran and Proteus that is so tight, that it is hard for the user to know where one starts and the other begins: Proteus is lauched by icon in the Safran's BarChart Editor, and when assignment changes have been made in Proteus (by drag and dropping objects in a tree structure), the changes to network is visible to the user in BarChart Editor, and can be accepted or recejcted.
One major benefit for the client of having Proteus in the solutution, is the high degree of configurability regarding business logic (rules controlling what can be dragged and where items can be dropped in the tree, etc, and how these moves are transformed in the SQL statements that make the ultimate changes to the Safran database).
The client can, with the Proteus Configurator, be self-sufficient when it comes to later adaptations to the solution regarding changing requirements and implementation of new ideas.
Aker Solutions - Statfjord Late Life Project (Q3 2009 - present)
Aker Solutions, in addition to extending the existing functionality provided by the predecessor to Proteus (see Kvaerner Oil & Gas below), these were the features that were mainly used in Statfjord Late Life (SFLL) Project:
1. Taking a snapshot of data every Monday morning (one dedicated user pressed a so called "Action-Button" in Proteus) and then visually seeing changes in activity and job data relative this reference point. If a value (planned or expended quantity, progress, start or finish dates) changes, it will show in orange colour, and be bold if value has increased, or italic if it has decreased. The tooltip for the cell will show the previous value. The "Last Values" for all these are also present in the grid, as well as the calculated "Delta Values", so that these can be added to grid, or used in pivoting reports to easily identify e.g which discipline has changed most since Monday. The snapshot database is automatically handled by Proteus and data is appended, providing an excellent souce of Audit Trails, should these be required, as well as having access to historical data for future analysis and to extract "lessons learned".
2. Loading data from PDMS export files, and showing pipes and pipe supports in a "Proteus Completion Report", where objects are colored according to their status. This provides a visual overview of data, that was previously not possible.
3. From the positive internal feedback given from 2 above, they also allow Proteus import PDMS data from structural steel to get similar overviews. Promineo is pleased to see that internal resources, such as Planning Manager, Dag Kustås, is using the Proteus Configurator to set up such things by themselves. The Proteus Configurator is the tool used to configure what data Proteus should load, how it should present data, how it should export data, etc, etc.
Bergen Group Rosenberg (Q3 2007 - present)
Promineo has been working very closely with Rosenberg, in particular Dag Fiskå (Planning Manager) and Tom-Ivar Barka (Project Engineer), when developing Proteus to the successful commercial product that it is today.
They are therefore the company that is currently having the most extensive use of the product, and seeing first hand how good PM products can get even better by having Proteus as an integrator. They have chosen Safran for network planning, and IFS for the the other ERP reqiurements. In our opinion, this is an ideal combination of PM tools for the following reasons:
- Safran has a very open database architecture that allows Proteus to load any activity related data (calendars, activity table, resource table, etc) that are needed.
- IFS has an equally open database architecture, and have in addition a wide range of API's that allows for making "controlled updates" in data from an external tool, such as Proteus. This places them in stark contrast to a system such as SAP, where the possibility to interact with resident data from an external system is virtually non-existent.
We (Promineo and Rosenberg) are currently investigating the possibilities to use Proteus as a custom CTR (Cost Time Resource) application, where pre-project planning is conducted, to provide the basis for an offer to a client. Once the offer is accepted, the transition from this pre-project state to actually creating a network in Safran is just a button click away - and it can also populate IFS with related lower level "deliverable" objects. This is good example of the great advantage that the open architectures of Safran and IFS provide to their clients, and how these products in fact, can become even better when Proteus enters into the mix.
How Proteus is used in Rosenberg was presented during our own Proteus TechDay2009, as well as at the annual Safran-IFS IT Seminar at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum 2009. The latter can be seen here (2.15 Mb)...
Another case that is worth mentioning here is how Proteus could save an extreme amount of time for the Quantity Surveyors doing spot check from drawings. The short version of the solution is this:
They used Microsoft Query to pull items from ONE drawing into an Excel workbook and deleted the items that were not part of the contract and modified the quantities to the "real" ones found in by survey.
They then did this for all 350! drawings and had to compile these 350 numbers into one final sum (that had contractual implications for the final price).
The REAL drawback was that when data going into any of these Excel books were refreshed, all the manual changes were LOST!
Proteus provided the user with one form that showed data for all drawings and where the surveyed quantities could be entered alongside the quantities from the database. The sum was momentarily recalculated for the whole contract when any changes were made.
This problem was the starting seed for how the "Proteus Shadow Data" concept came about, and it is described in more detail here (1.21 Mb)...
Kvaerner Oil & Gas (now Aker Solutions, 1998 - 2009)
Profiler - the predecessor of Proteus:
Profiler was used in numerous projects, such as Åsgard B, Sleipner Vest, Frigg, Kristin, Snøhvit, Statfjort Late Life, and a few others.
Its primary usages were these:
1. To bridge the gap between Activity level (called Level4) and underlying Job card level (called Level5), by allowing for synchronizeing the jobs' locatiion in time with the activities (ever changing) locations in time (since network was continually updated and dependences had ripple effects on dates).
2. To idenfity "holes in the job-setting". So that a discipline lead could filter out her acitivites and related jobs and look at the superimposed time-phased histogram and visually see that e.g "3 weeks from now I will have a problem unless I get the job-setters to intensify their work!".
3. Show Pipe Test plans where the jobs involved in pipe testing were shown in the Gantt diagram colored according to their function (Prefab, Install, Test, Heat Trace, etc) and these could be moved directly in the Gantt and changes committed back to source database.
4. MC overview reports. Profiler (and of course also Proteus) coud produce an Excel report where each column showed the week number (or day resolution for shut-downs offshore!), and under this the MC-Packs were shown, colored according to discipline, and having one diagonal line if it was sent to customer, and a diagonal the other way if it was accepted by customer. It also has a comment (red triangle) showing details for the MC Pack, such as OK, PA, PB check records.
5. To detect discrepancies between Level4 and Level5 jobs. It a job referred to an Activity, and this for any reason was "missing", Profiler would show the number of such jobs, but also the number of planned and earned(!) hours they had. In Proteus we have called these detectors "Watchdog Alerts", and they can be set up to monitor virtually any critera the project may want to monitor.
Snøhvit Project (2003 - 2005):
The late planning manager, Arild Lillegraven, said after Kvaerner had pulled through their critical phase of the Snøhvit Project (where the scope for Kværner was well into the hundred million dollar range):
"Kværner could never have managed their reporting needs to Statoil without this tool".
One of the critical issues for this project was that when a job was moved in time (drag and drop in Profiler), TWO separate systems had to be updated (MIPS and the Safran details for Statoil) and Profiler could rather easily accomodate this "unusual" synchronization scenario.
Another critical issue was producing the Handover Plan for Commissioning - the unique "Completion Report", a format that, to our knowledge, only Profiler (and of course now also Proteus) could generate in the world.
OHS (for ConocoPhillips Q3 2009)
OHS (Occupational Hygiene Solutions) were in charge of the ConocoPhillips ERES (EkoFisk Retrospective Exposure Study) Project (see Petro Article), where data from 1982 to 2002 was collected and compiled into a summary report, relating to working environment and possible exposures to various toxic substances. The implications of this study may be quite significant regarding possible legal claims related to environmental health.
OHS asked Promineo to take the historical data over helicopter trips to and from rigs and create a time-phased overview over the number of people present on each rig for each of the weeks in this 20 year time frame. This data would form the basis for the degree of "time-exposure" to various potential health hazards.
There were over a million records in the database (one for each trip), and the task of getting the desired overview would not have been easy with any other existing software, since Excel or any given database engine have no immediate support for time-phasing data (i.e spreading a quantity between a start and a finish date). For Proteus this was a fairly straight forward task, since it has the ability to load data, to timephase it, and to show the result in a graph.