Planning/Scheduling

Suppose that you want to prepare a schedule where the activities are sequenced in a way that meets plan or budget targets, so that your schedule maintains a specific value for some objectives over time. For example, you want to manage your drilling and completion program so that the expected production output from a field is within 5% of a specific quantity each month, or you want to carry out preventive maintenance so that resource use and costs are held close to a quarterly target, to ensure that you aren't under- or over-utilizing crews and equipment.

Our applications are primarily aimed at individual “power users”: that is, the people in an organization that manage operational plans and schedules, and update them on a regular basis. Our drag-and-drop Gantt interface and real-time impact analysis features give the user immediate insight into how those updates will alter key business objectives, such as cost, risk, and equipment utilization.

What we are often seeing these days, though, is that the collaboration potential that results from use of our products is regularly raised in discussions with our customers, and is seen by them as a critical benefit.

Today we're announcing a significant new capability: integration of Actenum DSO with Microsoft Project.

Not the spare capacity that's essential to success; I mean the hidden, unwanted capacity that's a drain on your costs and that's there because of inefficiency.

If more E&P companies applied classic project management principles to the well project drilling process, how much would this lower costs and increase overall drilling program efficiency?

We recently benchmarked our Actenum Rig Activity Scheduler (RAS) application against a manually-derived operational drilling schedule obtained from one of our clients, a large oil producer. We achieved:

• A 6% reduction in rig transportation costs, and
• A 38% reduction in time to production, which translated into
• More than a 15% increase in net present value.

Now that the Big Crew Change is upon us, and the easy oil is gone, oil and gas producers not only have to focus on rebuilding their base of knowledgeable employees. They also have to maintain existing projects—and develop new ones—while losing the senior people who possess the skills and knowledge to make effective operational decisions in challenging situations.

We're working on a proper architectural framework for planning and scheduling in production organizations. It provides a coherent process approach for the various activities and time horizons related to planning and scheduling, and also serves as a basis for the use of our technology solutions.

Earlier this month I was at Carnegie Mellon University attending the Center for Advanced Process Decision-making (CAPD) Annual Review Meeting, at the kind invitation of Professor Ignacio Grossman. CAPD brings together industry practitioners (primarily from process industry organizations) and academia, and harnesses a lot of brain power to work on some tough industrial optimization and process systems challenges.

In an earlier post I made some observations about the distinction between planning and scheduling. In terms of complex production organizations, planning is generally done in a “slow loop”, and establishes targets for the operational side of the organization to follow. Scheduling is then done in a “fast loop” at an operational level to allocate assets and resources so that these targets are met.