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CASE STUDY
Asset Transition – Finance & Board Considerations
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Preparation stage
Many organisations are vying for the opportunity to acquire production assets to boost their portfolio. Such major investments take time but can close and move quickly, applying pressure on handover and taking operational responsibility.
A key finding from our experience of many such transfers is that IT and data challenges are more complex and time consuming than clients expect at the outset. They are also mission critical for safe and efficient operations, and actively support the Safety Case. This can be greatly helped when your transition partner supports both buyer and seller.
Sword recommends a staged approach:
Pre-deal
- Transition Strategy, outline scoping, high-level estimates, contracts & procurement strategy, and confirmation of vendor capability
Transition project
- Detailed scope, firm proposal, resourcing plan and procurement schedule
- Transition project execution
- Handover
On-going support
- Helpdesk & IT support
- Information Management for Subsurface, Operations and Capital Projects
Enhancement
- Business performance improvement
- Safety and quality improvement
- Regulatory compliance
- Cost reduction
- New ways of working
- Subsurface reinterpretation, analysis and exploration
Recent transitions run by Sword have 80 or more applications to prepare, network & telecom vendors, hardware & software procurement, thousands of archive boxes, tens of thousands of tapes (such as seismic). Sword can organise and manage this for you and our knowledge of the vendors, technical scopes and pricing can give you a better result faster.
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The transition
Once a project scope has been outlined and you are talking with a specialist partner such as Sword, what will transition look like?
- Rapid mobilisation of the project team, information gathering and detailed planning. This first phase of the project typically takes a couple of weeks
- Implementation – very dependent on scale and scope, but 3-9 months is typical. A small unmanned platform may need a team of 4-5 to transfer whereas a large multi-asset deal could need a core team of 15-20 plus working with dozens of vendors. We flex to suit the scale and timing challenges
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Contracts & Procurement
- Contracts
We have sample contracts for most systems used in the energy sector and know the key players well. This accelerates the project, especially as many systems have interdependencies, which we take account of. Our specialists also help with novations and other contractual matters
- Procurement
Our buying power and repeat purchases give us great insight to vendors, their competitive strengths and weaknesses and knowing what things should cost. This allows us to efficiently procure on your behalf, saving time and money. You can still buy direct if that is your preferred strategy
PHASE
Project Initiation
Planning (pre TOO)
Transfer Of Ownership (TOO)
Post TOO
ACTIVITIES
- Agree post TOO service from seller
- Partner connectivity
- Information access
- Produce Project Initiation Document (PID)
- Applications strategy
- infrastructure strategy
- IM strategy
- Execution of applications, infrastructure and IM strategies
- Steady state support
- Legacy system
- Service improvement programme
- Ongoing IM plan
DELIVERABLES
Project Initiation Document
IT transition plan
Asset transfer
Stable, fully supported IT environment
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How to reduce risks
Our experience and specialist knowledge of the oil & gas sector helps reduce risk during transitions and for on-going services. The key risk areas for transition can be readily mitigated.
- Safety – We are experts in handling safety critical information in upstream oil & gas. We ensure your people and partners have the right work instructions, systems and up to date information to run operations safely. We can help with your Safety Case
- Production – The operational go-live is crucial and we are used to running engineering and subsurface information management to support this. This includes engineering works & drilling. You may also be considering Energy Transition. We can help with our knowledge of data requirements for this, such as CCUS, wind & electrification
- Complexity – For transition it is important to keep things simple. Enhancements can be incorporated later based on business cases. The clear goal is a clean and timely project so that there is no impact to your operational plans
- Change – When the project is running it is common for details to change, as the seller may not have considered all implications of data sharing or be able to readily extract it from their systems. Our expertise mitigates this risk
- Knowledge – New assets usually come with new people and transfers of personnel, so we focus on making their life easier. This ensures they know how to find information to support their work and be able to rely on it
- Time – transitions always have many timetable pressures, including influences from your business partners, investors, joint-ventures, the regulator, and others. Mitigate this by using a company who has done this many times, with a wide range of personnel ready to start fast and adapt as things change
- Cost – Reduce cost risks by using our smart procurement expertise for upstream systems & our flexible project resourcing means you only pay for what you need
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About Sword
Sword UK are focused on solving key business challenges within organisations, centred around developing the management of day to day IT, helping to optimise organisational infrastructure to allow customers to focus on high value activity. Sword UK support customers to succeed in their digital journey by introducing and implementing technology as an enabler not an inhibitor.
Sword
Johnstone House,
52 – 54 Rose Street, Aberdeen, AB10 1UD
E: Neale.Stidolph@sword-group.com
T: +44 (0)1224 506 110
www.sworditsolutions.com
