Aberdeen-based drilling performance improvement specialist Exceed has played the anchor role in raising performance levels aboard a super-drillship in the Transocean fleet.
The continuous improvement project resulted in the vessel’s performance increasing by 16%, from a 72% baseline to an average of 82% productive time in the first 12 months and 88% productive time during the second half of the wells campaign.
The rig, confirmed as the GSF Explorer, also improved its position in Transocean’s fleet rankings by 27 places, which represents a major jump in a fleet that today numbers 138 units, not counting further tonnage on order.
Moreover, the climb was greater than envisaged at the outset of the project.
In terms of savings, the increase was equivalent to 65 additional productive days which, at today’s dayrates for deepwater units, represents a considerable sum of money.
The project involved performance improvement coaches from the Scottish company working on rotation with rig personnel off Angola. In essence, this was an embedded operation where Exceed personnel worked hand in glove with Transocean people to raise performance levels.
Exceed director Ian Mills said: “We entered the continuous improvement project with five goals, which included deliver a return on investment of 5:1 or greater, embedding sustainable internal capability and improving the rig’s position in the fleet table.
“The step-change was realised not by us but by the rig team. We didn’t change technology, introduce new systems or make other capital investments. We simply worked with the most important asset, the rig team.
“We helped to provide consistency and continuity across the leadership team, introduce a culture of planning and learning, and establish rig best practice through the lessons learned. The rig team embraced the project and took the rig to new performance levels both in planning and execution.”
Over a period of 21 months, more than 410 induction sessions, plus more than 230 “advanced planning meetings” and “after action reviews” were held, and with close to 750 lessons learned, the team achieved a closure rate exceeding 95%.
The Angola project was very much a “rig-owned” initiative, versus a top-down performance improvement project. It was named NZILA by the rig team – a term taken from an Angolan dialect that translates to “passage to excellence”.
A NZILA logo incorporating the operator logo, the drillship and the colours of the Angolan flag was designed especially for the project. It was used on branded T-shirts, newsletters and other printed materials to increase project identity, ownership and support among the offshore team, and build project recognition among the office-based team.
The Exceed coaches, working on rotation on the rig, also produced short videos capturing key and non-routine drilling activities to help improve communications, health and safety, operational pre-planning and transferring best practice between crews.
Transocean’s operations manager, performance, for West Africa South, Wullie Strachan, said: “We are pleased with the way the project has developed and spread to the other operations we’d like to see improvements on. This is where we want to be in everything we do. One of our goals was to rise 10 places in the fleet standings: to deliver an upwards movement of 27 places is an outstanding achievement for the rig team.”
Mills added: “Our success lies not in what we do but in what your people continue doing after we’ve gone.
“Most performance improvement companies offer traditional management consulting. Exceed offers an integrated approach with a team whose backgrounds combine traditional consulting with hands-on oilfield expertise. As a result, we have developed a unique offering that gives clients the best of both worlds and delivers clear, quantifiable benefits.
“We carried out detailed project planning in advance and had a clearly defined exit strategy, focused on delivering an immediate return on investment and long-term, sustainable improvements.
“At the end of the day, we realise that, like any piece of equipment, our tools are only as good as the people who use them. Without the support and willingness from the rig team, our efforts would have made little difference.”
Another project with Talisman in the North Sea recently saw Exceed’s coaches delivering $1.7million in direct savings, along with an increase in productive time of 60 rig days – generating multimillion-dollar efficiencies.
As reported in Energy last year, Exceed launched the upstream sector’s first drilling project management consultancy to specialise solely in deepwater projects. The new division provides a full wells project capability, from conceptual design, exploration and evaluation through to full field development.
Exceed’s multi-disciplined deepwater project management team is currently working on the division’s first project for a national oil company and is in advanced talks with a number of other clients for work commencing in 2010.
On a note of history, GSF Explorer started out as the Hughes Glomar Explorer. It was built in 1973 by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co for a covert CIA undertaking.
The mission of Glomar Explorer was to raise a Soviet nuclear submarine that had sunk in the Pacific, resting on the ocean floor nearly 17,000ft (5,200m) down.
The Soviet Golf-II Class ballistic-missile submarine, K-129, sank on April 11, 1968, about 750 miles north-west of Hawaii. Ultimately, only a part of the sub was recovered and the ship was to spend much of its life in mothballs until rebuilt in the late-1990s as an ultra-deepwater drillship. It is perhaps only since that surgery was carried out that the former Howard Hughes ship, whose cover was to mine manganese nodules from the seafloor, finally came into its own.