Oil & Gas Publications
Publications, mainly written by Hermetica, on Value Management and the BP Cleeton Compression work
Whilst a relatively small project at £40m, the BP Cleeton Compression Project had a major influence on the philosophy behind Hermetica Consulting Limited. This was a very innovative project and received a lot of publicity as such at the time. Significant savings were delivered. Also included are newsletters, written by Mike (Charnley-)Fisher, which provide details of the project at the time - including the people involved and why it was such a success. This project led to a new role, the "Value Manager", which was presented at various conferences. It subsequently led to a similar role on a much larger project (£300m).
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Cleeton Compression Project Newsletters
The following two newsletters provide an insight into the nature of the project and the team spirit, spread across all the involved companies, which helped make the project such a success. Led by the BP project manager, Chris Harrison, and supported by BP Asset Management in Aberdeen, this team spirit took effort to develop - given several organisations who traditionally competed more than cooperated.
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July 1995 Newsletter
In addition to describing the structure of the project team, the newsletter includes some of the innovations which led to such signficant savings. On page 3 there is a model of the supporting structure - moving to three legs (rather than the traditional 4) was very unusual.
December 1995 Newsletter
This newsletter illustrates progress some 5 months later. The project was nearly one month ahead of schedule due to very close cooperation between designer and fabricator to allow construction to proceed despite design "holds".
Oil & Gas Industry Publications on the project
The project received a lot of attention from the industry press at the time. This was in an era when the ecomonic model for the project was based on an oil price of $14 a barrel (compared with prices which now hover around $100 / barrel)! In order to survive the industry had to change from a typical adversarial construction culture of claims and counter claims to one of working together. BP led this change - one which was rapidly picked up by other North Sea operators. The industry created an initiative called Cost Reduction in the New Era (CRINE) which encouraged this change.
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Cleeton Compression extends CRINE Culture
This two page overview was used to introduce the project, and some of the changes in ways of working, to the industry. If formed part of the CRINE newsletter at the time.
Projects : Alliance appliance
This article was written after interviews with the project team. The key phrase in here was "This is NOT business as usual", highlighting the major shift in ways of working which the project represented.
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Learning to Survive, People Dimension
This was a long (11 page) article which formed the basis for a presentation at the January 1996 CRINE conference. In particular it covers the innovative commercial arrangements (largely developed by myself) which facilitated co-operation.
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CRINE Best Practices
The CRINE movement published a book of "Best Practices" from across the industry in early 1996. No less than four such best practices from the project ended up in this publication.
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Smooth startup for Cleeton compression
The project celebrated the success of the capital phase of work in May 1996. Offshore installation went smoothly. This was significantly influenced by the fact that the BP onshore and offshore operations team had a major involvement with the project from the outset.
Value Management (a new role)
The BP Cleeton project was innovative from the perspective that, possibly for the first time, the main design contractor was heavily involved in life cycle economics of the development. Value management encompassed traditional capital cost estimating (including, unusually, fully integrated detailed "open book" costs from each of the Alliance partners), life cycle economics, detailed operational costs, availability studies and impact on revenue. In addition to costs, the project "gainshare" scheme included Safety, First Gas Date and Operations Interface. The latter allowed the project to be very flexible in accomodating late scope changes from BP operations.
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EPCI: The Value Manager - A new role
The project was invited to present this new role at the 1996 European Institute of Advanced Project and Contract Management (EPCI) conference in Norway. This paper was written to accompany this presentation.
Value Engineering in Process Design
The Gas Processors Association (GPA) is a global body which promotes technical and operational excellence through the gas industry. This paper was presented at their spring conference in 1996.