Schlumberger CEO Paal Kibsgaard, speaking at the 2019 Scotia Howard Weil Energy Conference, reported than since 2014, Schlumberger has navigated the deepest and longest service industry downturn on record. Throughout the nine years since he took office, Schlumberger has implemented a strategic roadmap that includes an overdue modernization of its operating platform. While Schlumberger has successfully driven innovation and performance for its customers it has lacked focus and investment in a similar innovation and performance platform for its own activities. According to Kibsgaard, this has impacted Schlumberger’s ability to translate the value created by our people and technology in the field into ‘optimized bottom-line results’.
Since 2012, the company has modernized its internal workflows, IT enablement and organizational structure, using best practices from leading companies in other industries. This includes supply chain, sales, maintenance, planning and product and service delivery. The ‘long overdue’ modernization program was of unprecedented size and complexity and has meant ‘rethinking of all our activities and workflows’. Key to the new system is a six-year long investment in an SAP-based, state-of-the-art IT framework. Components of the framework have been piloted in parts of the organization and will be rolled-out in North America in 2019, and subsequently, the rest of the world. Schlumberger is also evolving its management approach to become more collaborative and team based and to ‘directly appeal to our growing number of millennial employees, who already make up 55% of our workforce’.
In the E&P sector, Kibsgaard reported that Schlumberger’s technology platforms are now ‘built on top of Delfi’, the new, cloud-based data and software environment, ‘a secure collaboration workspace for all our E&P workflows’. Alongside Delfi is a ‘digital hardware framework’, with a clear set of design guidelines for Schlumberger’s hardware product developers. Finally, ‘In 2019, we intend to open source core components of our E&P data ecosystem, in collaboration with cloud providers—like Google and Microsoft—and several key customers, to ensure that we remain their trusted advisor on their digital transformation journeys’.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.