Docs exchange a great find for AGR Upstream

Necessity truly was the mother of invention at AGR Upstream Petroleum, a natural resource exploration firm that last year found itself needing a way to co-ordinate a AU$100 million ship refit involving nearly 40 subcontractors in three countries.

Recently acquired by German company AGR, Upstream provides oil and gas industry customers through divisions providing operations and maintenance, project management, drilling services, consulting services and sub-sea and downhole equipment. Current projects for the Melbourne-based company include both onshore and offshore Australian sites, as well as sites in India, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.

In the past, Upstream had managed such projects via e-mail, with new versions of drawings, schematics and other large documents regularly forwarded between team members separated by large distances. This approach, while more or less effective, introduced countless delays and retransmission efforts because of the sheer volume of information being pushed through the e-mails.

The business critical project involved the planning and installation of more than 700 tonnes of plant and equipment on the company's flagship Crystellation, which normally works in the Bass Strait. With the refitting work to be handled by five subcontractors working at Singapore's specialised Keppel Shipyard, as well as design subcontractors in the US and Australia, sheer size meant the old approach was going to be cumbersome and difficult -- and require significant logistical effort to ensure dozens of people could access the latest versions.

"You're in a situation where you go through one design, have got to make modifications, then have to reissue the drawings and get everybody up to speed," says IT manager Ivan Prescott. "We're talking about 30,000 drawings to be sent to 30 or 40 people, and it was silly to try and put this stuff out over the e-mail. We needed to collaborate in a managed way."

One of Upstream's offshore drilling rigs.

Upstream faced financial motivators as well as practical ones: with the company wearing nearly AU$1 million in lost revenue for each day the ship was away from its normal home in the Bass Strait, it was essential that the risk of delays be eliminated as much as possible.

The virtual documents office
Having identified a potential problem area early on, Upstream began discussions with long-time partner Newpath IT about ways to address it.

By embracing custom development rather than off-the-shelf applications, Newpath IT was able to spec out and build an online document exchange that would provide a common repository for Upstream's documents.

Built with a custom Web interface and MySQL database backend, the new exchange was fast-tracked and completed within just three weeks. Normally, says Prescott, developing, testing and refining such a significant project would have taken up to three months.

Hosted from Newpath IT facilities in the US, the document exchange was put through heavy usage during the course of the project, which ran through the second half of 2006 and involved the regular transmission of many gigabytes of data.

Rapid turnaround in the delivery of the system proved incredibly valuable for Upstream, for which the design and installation of new pumping and gas reinjection equipment was enough of a challenge already. The company began using the system from the beginning of the six-month refit, and it quickly proved popular with all parties concerned -- including no fewer than five subcontractors in Singapore and four more in other countries.

"Newpath were able to provide us with something that would fit in with our public Web site," says Prescott, "and allow a secure login to a backend where all parties concerned could upload and download documents very, very quickly. Documents were available within minutes of being uploaded, rather than sending our very large files via e-mail and having the delays associated with that."

A new content environment
One of the most valuable parts of Upstream's new content management system was that it not only enabled upload and download of project documents, but also tied in with the broader scope of work that Newpath IT was also performing for the company. This included a fully featured Web site, with everything from corporate policies and organisation charts to information on procurement, vacant positions, system processes and other corporate information.

Newpath IT has built the entire site around an easy to use editing tool that let employees update Upstream's public Web sites quickly and easily. Building on the site, the company has also developed tools such as an e-mail signature generator, which produces consistent employee e-mail signatures according to a single common style. Another development included a job ad generator, which integrates with Upstream's career management system to automatically extract and format job-wanted ads as HTML code for publication on third-party employment sites.

Such innovations have helped Upstream greatly improve employee participation in the online conveyance of information. And, given its massive success in saving time and money on the Crystellation refit, the document management system is now being considered for a more permanent role within the company's information infrastructure. Upstream is planning to roll the application in with its own Microsoft SharePoint Server environment, developing it for use by partners and other subsidiaries worldwide.

Having taken the company from a manual and inefficient e-mail based method of collaboration to full online publishing and document sharing in just a short while, Prescott is predictably enthused about the results of the AU$30,000 project and the long-term benefits it will deliver into the future.

"We were able to get the whole thing up and operational without too much catastrophe, and had full collaboration via our Web site," he says. "It was a job well done, saved us an enormous amount of money and has already paid for itself many, many times."