Shell's Smart Fields programme has built elements of Intelligent Energy into the key field developments over the past ten years. Considerable value has been achieved, from new technologies, new ways of working and global implementation.
In Shell, Collaborative Work Environments (CWEs) have been implemented on a large scale, mostly focusing on the production and field surveillance area and on the real time drilling monitoring. More recently, collaborative work environments have been set up to streamline field development planning. The environments have provided significant benefits to the assets, by enabling new ways of working, improved communication and faster decision making.
Shell and Wipro have teamed up to establish a flexible, global, large scale implementation programme. Gradually, the programme has converged on standard solutions and designs for processes and technologies and on a lean implementation methodology.
Strong focus has been placed on embedding the changes into the organisation. Enticing field teams to adopt and keep new ways of working has required some inventive methods and intensive coaching of staff at all levels.
In this paper, we will show:
An overview of Shell's Smart Fields programme
Examples of Collaborative Work Environments in the Middle East and other parts of the world
Benefits obtained from collaboration and Smart Fields solutions
People focused activities to embed new ways of working
Ways to sustain the solutions and the benefits
Lessons learned
In the past decade, Shell has developed and implemented Smart Fields technologies, making business cases and implementing the technologies as widely as feasible (see for example Potters and Kapteijn 2005). The uptake of the ‘smart’ technologies and sustained benefits was achieved across the global portfolio of assets in Shell. This has led to broad experience of deployment and sustainability, covering many operating environments, in terms of desert to arctic, field development/depletion types and various organisational models (e.g. Gerrard et al. 2010, Perrons 2010 and Cramer, Mabian and Tulalian 2010).
This has led to major contributions to the bottom line. The value of Smart Fields for Shell and its partners was assessed as 5bln US$ as a result of the smart technologies (Van den Berg et al., 2010). Learning from successes and failures in implementations, has provided deep insights in optimising of the approach for technology deployment.
Entering the second decade, the focus of the Smart Fields programme is on accelerating the implementation of the matured and new technologies across the world wide asset base, on realising the value and on sustaining the solutions and the benefits (De Best and Van den Berg 2012).
