Part 2 | Marathon Scales Asset Management Technology via SAP

Related Content | Part 1 – Marathon Upgrades Shale Asset Management

>> This is the 2nd part of the Marathon Upgrades Shale Asset Management column in our April print issue.

As mentioned in the first column, significant asset management and reliability modernization projects are occurring across manufacturing, and especially remote monitoring upgrades in the oil and gas industry. Low crude oil prices, legacy automation technology and a shift from offshore exploration to shale over the last ten years are just some of the reasons for this move by this conservative industry.

Marathon Oil, an exploration and production company, initiated a reliability modernization program for three drilling assets in Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota. The project included updating its legacy asset management processes for better efficiencies with SAP’s Plant Maintenance module — which was rolled out first in Europe. The three phases, in order, were minimum requirement functionality, value enhancement and a third installment called the gold standard.

The program’s first phase of minimum requirements focused on creating notifications, work order creations, and equipment health history, with the overall objective to do more reliability on the equipment in the field.

Marathon built out operator and technician screens for field monitoring via Synactive’s GuiXT, which allows for user-interface customization within an SAP environment. The remote monitoring of equipment includes valves, motors and pumps.

Essential takeaways from the initial deployment were the setup is complicated. “Converting from another system is challenging, especially from a data perspective,” says Paul Musser, IT oper. Manager at Marathon Oil via a webinar, titled, Preparing for the Future of Asset Management. We had to get buy-in from all levels of the organization, especially senior leadership so that they can communicate that message to all of the users. It takes time.”

The second phase enabled some mobile applications for users via SAP’s Work Manager solution, part of the mobile SAP Plant Maintenance platform. “It allows you to do plant maintenance transactions on an iPad or an iPhone,” says Musser.

Another component to the second phase, which started in 2015, was sending all equipment data into SAP’s Business Warehouse where it ties into key performance indicators (KPIs) and creates reports using Spotfire.

“It’s proven to be very beneficial from an analysis perspective to see where our significant deficiencies were from a breakdown perspective, where our reactive work orders were occurring and the percentage of planned work versus reactive work,” says Musser.

Musser adds this significant deployment phase, called the SAP Linear Asset Management project, started in the middle of 2015 and went live in April 2016. Vesta and SAP were implementation partners for this project and the SAP’s Linear Asset module allows operations to model linear-type data in SAP Plant Maintenance. Vesta is a professional services firm that provides Asset Management and SAP EAM solutions to asset-intensive clients.

“For example, we’ve got about 1,500 miles of oil and gas pipe in our Eagle Ford asset, and we needed to be able to report maintenance histories on those and maintenance activities on those to various regulatory agencies, such as the Department of Transportation,” says Musser. The modeling could also be effective for, perhaps, utility companies or rail companies, where they also have linear-type data.”

Digital transformations are appearing in many different manufacturing production areas, but many reports suggest predictive analytics — or operational visbility — is the first landing spot for many enterprises.

As seen with Marathon Oil, they’re going farther and pushing the needle with modeling to gain even more efficiencies, workforce get ready.

For the entire webinar and the entire overvriew of the case study, see the video below.