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under a state of “statistical control”, and to highlight Project background
departure from standard operating conditions.
An application of Six Sigma in
Eni: well completion process
In the past number of years, the upstream in-
dustry has gone through profound changes in
its external business environment, and oil & gas
companies have also had to deal with internal
challenges related to increasing costs, time of
development projects and higher production
decline rates in brown fields, as well as grea-
ter risks deriving from new frontier exploration,
ultra-deep-water drilling and unconventional ac-
tivities. Eni operates in this international and hi-
ghly competitive environment and, therefore, is
constantly subject to new challenges. In order to
achieve and maintain Eni’s competitive advanta-
ge in such a turbulent environment, it is crucial to
continuously renew core competences, reinforce
processes, ensure the deployment of synergies,
and disseminate know-how throughout the who-
le company.
Fig. 3 - Box plot (left) and control chart (right) of completion delay
With the aim to strengthen these elements, and in
accordance with the Eni’s operational excellence
policy, since 2011 Eni has been implementing a
Continuous Improvement Program across the who-
le company, both at the headquarters and subsi-
diary levels, and has adopted the Lean Six Sigma
(LSS) methodology as one of the main tools to be
leveraged to fulfil the Program’s objectives. The de-
ployment of Six Sigma started with a pilot phase of
projects in few subsidiaries. After having successful-
ly completed the pilot phase, Eni further deployed
the methodology in other subsidiaries, including
some of its joint venture partnerships, leveraging on
competence developed through LSS training and
delivering tangible results. One of the projects that
have delivered significant results was about the im-
provement of the Well Completion process.
The completion of drilled wells for onshore ope-
rations is one of the most important phases of
a well construction job, sometimes impacted
by internal or external factors (i.e. subcontrac-
tors efficiency, availability of drilling materials or
equipment, schedule accuracy etc.), that lead
to variation in the overall operational time and
cost. The scope of the specific Continuous Im-
provement project was to decrease the varian-
ce between planned and actual well completion
durations.
The approach
The project team defined the focus for the im-
provement activity. Historical data was collected
from the logs of accomplished well completion
in order to better understand the current per-
formance of the well completion process. After
an initial analysis, the project objective was set
at reducing the schedule variance in comple-
tion jobs by 50%. The team performed further
analyses of the data and decided to split the
well completion process into different activities.
An analysis using a box plot (figure 3) showed
the differences in variation between such acti-
vities. This allowed the team to focus on those
activities that had the most variation. Additional
data about the failure types during completion
was collected from the operational logs.
A Pareto analysis (figure 4) on the failure types
gave the project team more information regarding
the areas to investigate in more detail. Finally, the
team conducted a brainstorming session using a
Fishbone diagram to investigate root causes of the-
se failures and to identify possible solutions. To this
aim, two main “areas” were analysed:
• increase of operational efficiency;
• improvement of the current completion stra-
tegy.
Impiantistica Italiana - Maggio-Giugno 2015 21