Aligning Planning to Eliminate Inefficiencies and Errors
Brief outline:
Masterplan – Portfolio management for high-level operational alignment
Equinor needed better cross-disciplinary collaboration at a higher level. They required a system that provided a clear and comprehensive view of all workstreams, and access to reporting based on integrated data analysis to improve planning and decision-making.
Keystone created Masterplan, a module of Keystone OPEN. This digitalization tool is designed to enhance operational efficiency, project planning, and stakeholder communication. It provides a clear portfolio overview based on integrated data across rigs. The modular structure allows seamless adaptation to various operational requirements, ensuring a structured and efficient workflow. Masterplan is now part of Keystone OPEN and Equinor continues to use it on Statfjord A, B & C.
Location
Statfjord A, B & C, Norwegian Continental Shelf
The Challenge
Equinor’s planning teams experienced challenges coordinating schedules due to the use of different tools, like Excel and Gantt charts. The lack of standardization and multiple data structures made it difficult to extract reports and make comparisons across streams and teams. This led to time-consuming manual data-transfer tasks and the risk of human error.
For example, the intervention schedule was part of several processes in a hierarchy where the work schedule had to be manually edited in excel from each team. Conflicts, dependencies and contentions were all managed either via manual entries or discussions, meaning planning was done in silos, causing sub optimal outcomes. In addition, the manual updates risked human errors and lag times in information being available.
With high activity on the three Statfjord platforms, effective coordination of resources, assets, and personnel, is essential to prevent delays. Equinor identified the need for far greater visibility across all assets to improve planning. While individual platform planning was important, real progress required a unified approach. This led to an internal request for a schedule that aligned drilling and well intervention planning, which could be integrated into the main plan for full collaboration.
The Solution
After seeing Keystone’s work with Aker BP, Equinor requested a workshop to discuss their planning and coordination challenges. This led to the development of Masterplan, which drives efficiency by providing data visualization of all activities – including rig input, production, platform, and projects – optimizing planning across all operations.
Masterplan ensures earlier alignment across portfolio assets, helping to proactively identify and resolve conflicts well ahead of execution dates. Previously, lack of full visibility caused schedule delays, impacting productivity.
The planning teams can now see the different dependencies and potential conflicts across portfolio assets in real time through Masterplan. During meetings, they can instantly respond to questions using the integrated information in Masterplan, such as client information, time estimates, and engineer availability.
Compared to traditional tools like Gantt charts, Masterplan offers enhanced functionality such as a comment function that allows stakeholders to provide information to directly improve understanding and efficiency, compared to emails or commentary in meetings.
The Result
Masterplan has significantly improved planning decisions by providing comprehensive data insights and reports, improving collaboration and resolving issues ahead of execution. These efficiencies limit downtime and lost productivity during operations. By standardizing and automating inputs, the risk of human errors and time-lag are significantly minimized. Planning teams can now focus on analysis and action, rather than dealing with the limitations of siloed, manual and disconnected processes. Previously, meetings had to focus on gathering information, rather than more proactive and value-adding activities.
With Masterplan in place the intervention team found a special use, adopting a list view to help the lead engineers follow up on activities and processes. This reduced the load on the planners and lead engineers and eliminated several hours of manual data entries.
The main outcome has been the optimization of the drilling schedule. The ability to visualize all the different activities simultaneously with real-time information, means drilling teams can more easily find solutions that will optimize production. For example, when maintenance was required on the north shaft, Masterplan enabled them to visualize and prove an idea – moving the north rig to the south shaft as a way to keep production up while performing maintenance. Having visual representation of real-time data, Equinor were able to avoid a one-month loss of production with a clever solution from the intervention team using Masterplan.
Going forward, Equinor wants to align Masterplan with their intervention collaboration platform and integrate other tools / software by the end of 2025. Equinor also aims to see the consequences of the decisions they make across production, costs, risk, and rig utilization based on various parameters. Longer term, Keystone is working with Equinor to ensure the software moves from passive decisions making to a more proactive AI approach. Not only showing opportunities available to solve dependency issues but making suggestions on the best solution.
Highlights
- Replaces Excel-based workflows with Masterplan to enable collaborative portfolio management
- Facilitates the creation of multiple schedule alternatives to optimize decision-making
- Integrates with other planning programs to ensure streamlined processes
- Real-time updates have removed manual work, reduced the risk of human error, and ensured that information sharing is up to date and correct
Client quotes
“Our collaboration has been really good when it comes to us presenting a problem and Keystone offering several suggestions and discussing possible solutions to ensure we get the best possible result. The developers deliver top notch solutions, and I think this is because they always ensure they understand our challenges by offering mock-ups along the way that we can workshop as a collective. This is something that stands out compared to other software companies we’ve worked with”.
Nina Iren Kåsa, Planning Leader for Well Interventions, Equinor
“It is evident that Masterplan offers a lot of value to us as it’s been tailor made for our needs. When I first saw the Masterplan, I was amazed to see how multiple disciplines could come together and just look at one page and understand the full picture”.
Oddbjørn Larsen, Head of Planning Centre – Field Life Extension, Equinor