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materials, or to obtain new authorization to proceed with
site and camp operations.
Is very important (and only few companies do it) to
analyze the non conformances to understand how
our project setup distribute the non conformances
value.
More stringent requirements for timely reporting on
operations and accidents might be required, as well as
risk mitigation plans for critical operations such as drilling.
Oil & gas companies need to ensure that vital documents,
including approvals for drilling, building, and maintenance,
are available throughout the enterprise and across
enterprise boundaries to minimize risk and ensure Fig. 4 - Examples of risk criteria for a project business
regulatory compliance.

Real Time Monitoring and

Predictive Maintenance

During the construction phase, major uncertainties are
related to volumes in place and economics. As the level
of information increases, these uncertainties are
mitigated and consequently the importance of the
uncertainties related to the recovery factor increases.
The situation is more critical in offshore fields and for
heavy-oil reservoirs.
In order to avoid excessive computation effort, some
simplifications are always necessary. The key point is to Fig. 5 - Market risk: the viewpoints of three partecipants
define the simplifications and assumptions that can be
made to improve performance without significant
precision loss. Simplifications are possible, for instance, in Criticality-based maintenance
the modeling tool, treatment of attributes and in the way This technique informs decisions on maintenance strategy
several types of uncertainties are integrated. by identifying which assets are critical to the process and
Best-in-class companies use a variety of techniques to what the process impacts would be if the asset were to
reduce maintenance costs, increase uptime, and increase fail. Criticality-based maintenance also informs
availability. procurement strategy so that inventories, and the costs
These techniques include the following points. associated with keeping them, are reduced but not at the
expense of increased downtime.
Condition-based monitoring
Placement of sensors to measure various conditions Performance center or center of excellence
(temperature, vibration etc.) to detect situations that may The most advanced companies have adopted centers of
indicate potential equipment failure. The more excellence where engineering staff are able to bring
sophisticated systems have alerting capabilities and are together engineering knowledge for root cause analysis
integrated with enterprise asset management applications when potential problems are identified. Centers of
that can automatically generate inspection or work excellence can also have a view of multiple assets to
orders. support decision making and maintenance planning and
even suggest future equipment design modifications.
Predictive maintenance
Predictive maintenance goes beyond condition-based
maintenance in applying advanced analytics to predict Operations and Decisions
potential equipment failures, providing enough notice to Making important decisions in the petroleum industry
procure complex non-commodity replacement requires incorporation of major uncertainties, long time
equipment. Xylem identify a departure from normal horizons, multiple alternatives, and complex value issues
operating levels of a piece of equipment rather than into the decision model. Decision analysis can be defined
comparing performance with expected performance on different and embedded levels in petroleum exploration
levels for the equipment class. and production stages. Decision analysis is a philosophy,

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