WIRELINE Issue 35 Spring 2016

CASE STUDIES

EFFICIENCY

Efficiency spotlights An Efficiency Spotlights section on Oil & Gas UK’s website showcases case studies from companies that are addressing costs by working smarter. Wireline presents just some of the good ideas being put into practice and delivering value.

approach throughout every department in the organisation, no matter how big or small the task. Our highly effective mechanism ensures all good ideas are gathered, evaluated and shared across the company. It is important to ensure collaboration at all levels and acknowledge how someone’s input has contributed to our aim of reducing the lifting cost per barrel.” Nexen has applied the approach to improve the efficiency of the safety briefings it provides to the 1,000 or so new workers or ‘green hats’ who descend on Nexen’s assets each year. What this means in practice, is that if ten scaffolders are required for a job, contractors provide five seasoned and experienced offshore workers together with five staff new to the platform, creating a ‘buddy system’ that ensures rapid and effective dissemination of key safety procedures and allows Nexen to increase productive time per green hat. Another example of the cultural shift and commitment to more effective planning is the approach now being

EXCEPTIONAL SPORTS PERFORMANCE INSPIRES NEXEN EXCELLENCE In recent years, Nexen’s management has sought to evolve the company’s performance to become a truly ‘Best-In-Class’ operator. To inject creativity and eradicate entrenched ways of working, Nexen’s leadership team examined the outstanding sporting excellence of Olympic athletes for inspiration in motivating their entire workforce. They understood that workforce collaboration and two-way communication was crucial to achieving cultural transformation through new experiences, beliefs and behaviours that deliver top business results and a common language that drives accountability both individually and collectively across the business. To help achieve ‘efficiency of execution’ in every aspect of activity, both on and offshore, Nexen invited Olympic rower, Cath Bishop, to its Leaders’ Forum in 2014. Cath outlined the philosophy behind the ‘marginal gains’ theory that came to public attention when Sir Dave Brailsford became the British Olympic Cycling Team’s performance director. The doctrine is about targeting opportunities to make small incremental efficiency improvements, which, when added together, deliver significant improvements. The resulting new practices at Nexen have improved productivity offshore from five and a half hours to over eight hours per shift, while the company’s new mindset and behaviours are embodied in a business model known as ‘The Steps to Accountability’, which includes a commitment to effective planning and each person holding themselves and others to account for achieving superior results. This is now making a difference to the company’s success as one of the largest oil producers on the UK Continental Shelf, along with a suite of tools to equip employees in implementing the culture change and to naturally engrain the new ways of working into everyday tasks. Ray Riddoch, Nexen’s managing director UK and SVP Europe, explains: “Efficiency of execution is the core value, along with excellence in health, safety and environmental performance. We encourage this

taken to well intervention operations. Nexen deploys a tool in the planning stage to measure the condition of internal components within oil wells which, together with predictive technology, allows

highly accurate virtual well interventions to be modelled. The process has transformed the ability of engineers to visualise the wellbore, select the appropriate tools before the intervention takes place and, as a result, reduce the time required to

return the well to production.

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