An Integrated Digital Collaborative Work Environment for Drilling
Authors: Amer Mustafa , Radwhi Asem , Ali Abdullah , Ali Amir 
Published: February 2022

To adequately manage and streamline these business processes, the Oil & Gas industry has been over many years investing in countless number of digital solutions and platforms in a pursuit to support all business areas starting from planning, well engineering, operations reporting, real-time monitoring, reaching predictive analytics and automated drilling. Integrating these many different systems seamlessly is still a challenge even within the same company. Operating companies that run numerous drilling activities to deliver thousands of wells annually face these challenges the most, where developing an integrated collaborative digital work environment to support the business is becoming necessary and emphasized with the current initiatives for digital transformation.

In this paper, the experience of developing a digital collaborative environment is shared, focusing on how to manage such a complex project from both ends: drilling and IT perspectives.

The developed environment supports multiple levels of integration starting from business processes, data flows and governance, applications and services, up to knowledge management and machine learning workflows.

The platform of such solution is based on modern microservices design patterns, which is the constituent to develop complex business requirements, and simplifies the development and maintenance activities, promoting fast delivery and high-quality product. In addition, it provides an open architecture to allow third-party software services to be integrated seamlessly.

Managing the project stakeholders was a big challenge with wide variety of stakeholders’ groups and their widely different backgrounds, and that was overcome by continuously involving stakeholders and transparently communicate to them detailed project status update with challenges and successes.

A collaborative integrated work environment was introduced to cover the specific business domain as end-to-end process: starting from automated requirements elicitation from upstream teams such as reservoir management, exploration, and producing, going through rig scheduling & budgeting, then well design and engineering, with full functionality for automated well monitoring during the execution phase, reaching the end-of-well activities and well handover process to next stakeholder.

The new environment helped to support the integrity of multiple business processes with a significant process performance improvement up to 100% in some cases which resulted in valuable time & cost saving. In addition, data flow and processes workflow was enhanced and the timeline was crashed from weeks to few days.

The result of this work is a digital platform that is integrated, intelligent, enriched and orchestrated that innovatively transforms the subject business processes, by not only integrating in-house developed applications, but also offering a stable platform for third-party software services integration, paving the road for an effective and efficient digital transformation journey for the targeted activities in operating companies.