Faster and Profitable Production Optimization Decisions through Workflow Automation and Business Process Management - A Unique Concept

Operational efficiency improvement is a fundamental requirement and the continuous effort to achieve it is the inevitable need for any organization that targets profitable throughput in today's volatile market. Based on a study for a group of North American oilfields, in a typical mature oilfield, on an average 6% to 10% production deferments are caused by the process inefficiencies. Organizations continuously look for cost effective technologies that can facilitate implementing systematic operating procedures to maximize value of available resources and to provide a controlled environment for executing defined activities efficiently. Business process management (BPM) is a technique that brings in a governance mechanism to the efficient execution of processes. It uses various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business process to generate and track improvement actions. A typical project implementation involves a holistic review of the existing processes, identifications of the bottlenecks, mapping of the stakeholders and developing definitions for efficient corrective actions that enable closing system gaps. Early engagement with the stakeholders and an insightful management of change (MOC) are the key requisites of assuring the successful process roll out. Despite many industries, such as, medical and financial institutions, human capital management firms and logistics tracking system providers, have exploited the use of BPM and workflow automation to enhance their operation management capabilities, oil and gas industry still lags behind in capitalizing the benefits of this useful combination. This paper demonstrates the stepwise approach of implementing effective strategies, methods, and techniques to model and roll out collaborative solutions to help multi-disciplinary teams to execute business processes efficiently and consistently, whilst ensuring adherence to standards and agreed guidelines for maximizing efficiency and profitability. A real implementation case is presented, where a complex integrated production management and optimization system is managed leveraging workflow automation and BPM that has resulted in significant efficiency gain.