PIDX International held its EU spring conference in London this month. EU director Dave Wallis stressed the PIDX goal of becoming the sole global ebusiness standard for the oil and gas industry—backing up this claim with a world map showing PIDX use in over 20 countries.
Shell’s Huibert Vigeveno noted that over capacity was changing the refining industry footprint from multiple small local refineries to ‘world scale’ facilities. Pressure on margins is likewise driving supply chain optimization. Shell’s approach is ‘global, standard and simple,’ leveraging its ‘GSAP’ transaction processing and reporting system and ‘CAP’ a constellation of interoperating applications. Interaction with third parties is being standardized, leveraging a ‘global standard for data exchange’ under PIDX governance.
Kay McDonald, materials process manager with Shell provided some chapter and verse on the scale of the procurement problem. Her department has 2600 staff managing 30,000 contracts from 120,000 suppliers and over a million invoices annually—covering ‘everything except the hydrocarbons.’ An ‘end to end’ review of maintenance management procedures is underway to address issues such as maintenance practices that challenge on-time delivery of materials, unrealistic required-on-site dates and multiple short cuts around official procurement best practices.
Andy Walker described BP’s progress in master data management. Mergers and acquisitions have led to BP inheriting a variety of processes and systems, impacting master data quality. BP’s MDM vision is to leverage MDM in a ‘controlled processes’ for creating and maintaining master records with a single, group-wide record of reference for consuming systems. All BP ERP projects must link to MDM to comply with the BP master data standards. ‘Live’ MDM processes have been deployed at several BP upstream and downstream units worldwide—feeding into BP’s SAP and materials systems. These integrate with Dun and Bradstreet’s (D&B) ‘DUNS’ company identifiers and hemp track corporate legal daisy chains.
BP makes extensive use of SAP’s NetWeaver development environment for interactive forms, reporting and one time data entry and validation. Data views consolidate to an SAP Enterprise Portal. MDM workflows leverage SAP Process Integration to feed data consuming SAP and non-SAP ERPs. Walker emphasized BP’s use of ‘standards’ although, apart from D&B, it would appear that BP, like ExxonMobil, largely rolls it own.
Daryl Fullerton asked for volunteers to participate in developing a PIDX standard for exchanging supplier KPI1 data between service companies and operators2. The initiative sets out to fix ‘scorecard overload and data inconsistency.’ Such a standard would reduce data input for suppliers, improve data quality and speed performance review. Fullerton calculates the saving to industry from such an effort at $90-135 million. More from www.oilit.com/links/1105_26.
1 Key performance indicator.
2 Not clear if this includes providing operator KPIs to suppliers!
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