Virtual Inventory Solution for Offshore Norge (formerly Norwegian Oil and Gas Association)

Infopulse has a long history of collaboration with Offshore Norge. Our preceding project with the same client was to create a Critical Material Requirement (CMR) tool. This solution allowed ‘coopetitors’ to place common system requests for the required machinery in ad hoc and emergencies. Such situations can potentially turn into immediate production losses if there is no access to other operators’ inventories to search for the necessary equipment across multiple databases.

Having adopted the culture of ‘coopetition’ – a mutually beneficial collaboration among competitors, oil and gas players utilize Offshore Norge’s offerings to minimize costs and create benefits for the whole pool of oil and gas operators. The lack of universal standards for efficient material management resulted in radical excess of inventory, extra expenses on warehouse and maintenance, environmental burden as well as regulatory non-compliance.

Without consolidated information in Material Master Data that would fall under one single standard, millions of euros could be lost due to production downtimes. For instance, if an operator had a piece of equipment broken that caused oil rig operational interruption, they had to manually search for this piece, using their personal connections – by calling or emailing associates of other oil and gas companies. Sometimes, instead of searching for equipment due to lack of transparency and visibility, an operator would instantly order a new piece of equipment, increasing equipment overhead on the continental shelf.

Thus, we needed to produce a brand-new inventory management system that would allow operators from the Norwegian continental shelf to share equipment from their stocks among other operator companies and reduce at least 1/4 of stock overlap.

• The client had earlier attempted to create such a system several times. However, none of the outcomes of such endeavors could meet their expectations and tackle the issue with SKU description matching. Infopulse introduced a modern technology that could solve the challenge of the client.
• Furthermore, the client wanted to fully capitalize on the ‘economy of share’, transforming its operations with an environmentally conscious approach to using equipment, storage optimization, and purchasing only necessary machinery.
• In addition, the client required a robust solution that would allow for incremental development and further scalability if necessary
• Finally, the solution had to address the issue of sharing data that comprised of both sensitive and non-sensitive information, circulating among operators

‘Share today – invest in tomorrow’ has become the motto of the new system as Offshore Norge was planning and executing the project with a revolutionary idea at its core.

The Virtual Inventory solution provided to Offshore Norge by Infopulse vastly improved material management for oil and gas operators:

• Since all databases are in sync now and the system works smoothly, the urgent search for equipment is no longer a challenge with aggregated data.
• 10+ major Norwegian shelf operators can, from now on, reuse the equipment and reduce the ecological footprint.
• Reduced stock overlap by at least 25%
• Costs and inventory size cut: the project saved up to hundreds of millions of Euros for oil and gas operators:
  • fewer inventory levels (reduced CAPEX) due to shared information on excessive materials and predefined processes for interaction and transaction among operators
  • lower OPEX reduction through reduced warehouse costs due to fewer inventory levels
• Increased cross-sale of equipment and spare partsMore efficient utilization of stored spare parts and materials resulting in reduced waste.
• More efficient utilization of stored spare parts and materials resulting in reduced waste.