Speaking at the Philadelphia SAPPHIRE’99 meeting this month, Dieter Raphalsky introduced key new technology in SAP’s strategy for the upstream. The new Energy Integration Platform (EIP) exposes SAP’s Oil Industry Solution (Oil IS) to the geotechnical world. The upstream extensions of Oil IS have been developed in conjunction with Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) using PwC’s Prema Plus software as a blueprint. Landmark’s Doug Meikle described how the E&P value chain was to be streamlined by integrating field data capture to production allocation
Tobin
The EIP leverages existing SAP mainstream functionality (financial, controlling, JVA, Materials and plant) with third party domain specific software. Current partners in the EIP are Tobin who provides ownership, lease data, and contracts, and Landmark, for field data capture and reservoir surveillance with TOW/cs and Aries for economics. The EIP will provide a graphical front end to all of the above, while the back end is R/3 with data in an E&P master financial data store of contracts and pricing information.
GIS
The EIP graphics offer application launching, a GIS view of acreage, exception highlighting and operational and accounting views. EIP messaging is by ‘semi-synchronous’ links between SAP and Tow/cs and fully synchronous links within the Landmark environment for production allocation through COM/DCOM objects. The link to the Tobin datasets is through XML. The EIP promises a graphical view of shared data, and reduced duplicate data entry.
Information Warehouse
The EIP offers a graphical entry point to SAP’s Business Information Warehouse (BIW) - described as a ‘new upstream paradigm.’ The BIW Financial to geotechnical integration is claimed to improve decision making and to automate reporting of lease operating statements and other key performance indicators. Other BIW functions include ad-hoc queries and views of expenditure, return on investment, finding costs, drilling statistics, capex, reserves, production volumes, lifting costs and field operations. Business critical information such as a lease operating statement can be viewed through a configurable browser - the "Business Explorer Browser" - or displayed in Excel. The BIW is part of a new paradigm of data flow throughout the oil co. Production data is allocated once and for all, and broadcast throughout the system. This allows for automated rental and royalty payments, revenue forecast, regulatory reporting and so on.
business objects
Shared business objects include "well completion", "well bore", "field" and "reservoir". The EIP will link through the Oil IS to global supply chain management and allow for buying and selling over internet with mySAP.com. Downstream ERP Data Warehousing projects are underway with Mobil and Texaco while 23 oil and gas companies already use SAP Business Information Warehouse in transport, trading and retail. Phase one of the new architecture encompasses production operations and accounting will be released early next year. Phase two sees increased geotechnical integration and a new E&P product to manage asset ownership across the whole business.
PDM comment - Business object deployment may prove difficult in view of Landmark's previous experience and views on this technology! But as we have said before, Landmark is playing hardball in the area of geotechnical to business IT. The apparent progress of Landmark and Tobin as solution providers to SAP contrasts with the existential questioning of COM for Energy.
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