Abstract
With seven years experience, Shell has concluded that Collaborative Work Environments (CWEs) provide significant benefits in the production surveillance and field management area. As a consequence, the company has embarked on a wide scale implementation in all its major existing and new assets around the world. Many of these are now in place. The environments have enabled faster and better decision making by improved communication and easy sharing of relevant information and data. Business benefits include increased oil production, longer equipment life, improved HSE and lower operating cost.
The concept of CWEs has evolved, gradually expanding from original real time monitoring centres. Currently, centres for production surveillance and field management and drilling monitoring centres are the most common.
The implementation programme has evolved, converging on standard solutions and designs. Standards are now available for processes, disciplines and organisation to be involved, the required information and data, the audio visual technologies and for the physical facilities, the collaboration rooms and offices. In each asset, an assessment identifies the key aspects relevant to the asset and formulates the best collaborative solution for it.
Considerable learning has been obtained in various aspects, such as improved access to global expertise, introducing standard processes and ways to sustain the solutions and the benefits.
