1. Field game enters the fifth quarter
Staff from Wytch Farm get to grips with the operations excellence game in Southampton
Photography: Terry Beasley
Earlier this year BP announced a goal not just to be a good operator but a great
one. So what does this mean for upstream operations and how will business units
get there? Oliver Broad finds out
HEN PEOPLE talk about operations excellence in BP it is often in terms of
the prize that's out there. This might equate to a ‘fifth quarter' of
production or a phantom oilfield with the potential to produce 200,000
barrels of oil a day. Whatever way it is expressed, it is clear that BP considers the
prize of being a world class operator to be, well, how can you put it…really big.
It might strike you as odd then that to produce these phantom barrels—the
missing volumes between potential and actual production—operations people are
focusing first on eliminating the small defects, not the big defects. For Scott
Urban, BP's upstream vice president for Europe, the way ahead is clear: "We
need to find out where every defect and every loss is in the system and attack it
with a vengeance."
However, being a great operator goes beyond production volumes. For BP's
upstream business it is about producing hydrocarbons safely and without doing
harm to the environment. Studies of upstream operations indicate that for every
20,000 minor defects, there is one major incident. Operations excellence is also
about being more effective in integrity management, achieving higher production
efficiency and lower operating costs.
For that to happen, says Dan Replogle, head of upstream operations, "BP needs
to deploy the right people in the right places, provide skills for the future,
increase front-line engagement and increase the uptake among operations people
of key tools." One of these key tools, the operations excellence simulator, was
piloted in November 2000. Simulator workshops have since involved upstream
operations people from the North Sea, Alaska and, more recently, the Lower 48 in
the US.

2. Staff from Forties
PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY: The simulator is based on a manufacturing
excellence game, with particular emphasis given to health, safety and
environmental (HSE) performance. It is essentially a board game simulation of an
upstream operation that involves up to six people working in operations,
maintenance and business services. The goal is to work together to maintain a
consistently high level of production efficiency, while avoiding any HSE incidents.
The catch, as employees from BP's Wytch Farm, Forties and the Southern North
Sea assets found out during a simulation exercise in the UK in October, was that
defects continuously entered the system. For example, you might get
contaminants in raw materials or defects from improper storage of maintenance
materials. And this is simulated in the game with a knock-on effect on
performance.
At the start of the game, the teams tended to behave reactively—a ‘run the plant
hard and fix it fast' kind of mentality. Most found, however, that when you're
continuously fighting fires it is hard to spare resources to invest in HSE. And, of
course, there are penalties to be paid for environmental and safety incidents.
Teams can choose to invest in good practices to eliminate defects. This planned
approach to work, says production efficiency engineer David Duguid, "is like
having a protective barrier to stop bugs entering the plant." Eliminating defects to
improve plant reliability is not a cost. It is an investment.
The goal for each team is to be a world-class operator. This deploys resources at
the right time and in the right place and takes lessons learned from elsewhere in
the organization to create results. This is also simulated in the game by a ‘peer
assist' in that other teams are able to give advice on how to stop defects at the
source. As Urban comments: "There is a bit of learning somewhere that can have
an impact across the world."

3. Staff from the Southern North Sea
DEFECT ELIMINATION: "To me this really gives people an insight into what a
great operator looks like," explains Larry McVay, upstream technology vice
president for operations and safety. "It gets people to engage in the identification
of defects and understand how eliminating them can contribute to performance."
This understanding is taken from simulation to real life through action teams.
These are small, focused and cross-functional teams that target a defect to
eliminate within 90 days and within a small budget. "A number of defects that
came out of the discussions had been borne for some time," says operations
excellence consultant Andrew Fraser. "The simulator helped people realize they
can easily take action that will not only release value for the company but also
make their work a safer and more environmentally friendly place to be."
One team from Wytch Farm set a goal at the end of the workshop to solve a
problem at Furzey Island where chemical day tanks had been overfilling. The
action team will concentrate on a narrow area, implement the easy steps first and
track their performance.
PLANNED WORK: BP has created the operations value process (OVP) to support
the work of action teams. This is a group-wide framework to verify that the right
processes are in place to enable a team to minimize costs, optimize production,
effectively execute planned work, eliminate unplanned outages, cause no harm to
people and the environment, and use the right people and processes.
"You also need good recognition of people's efforts if defect elimination is to be
sustained," says Fraser. Within the OVP, leadership forums are designed to
connect results to actions, make sure knowledge is shared and create a strategy
for going forward. Another tool is the choke model that focuses on key constraints
to hydrocarbon production to allow the operator to identify performance
improvement opportunities.
In striving to be a great operator BP has put in place a set of tools that are
helping it to be more rigorous in eliminating defects. In the case of the operations
excellence simulator, still at a preliminary stage in its roll-out, it is also about
changing people's behaviours. McVay comments: "The simulator is about looking
at operations through a business lens and it is also about capturing the hearts
and minds of the workforce."