Field game enters the fifth quarter

 Staff from Wytch Farm get to grips with the operations excellence game in SouthamptonPhotography: 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. 

 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." 

 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."