Transaction Availability for Remote Sites

SAP has many innovation examples using Platform Solutions with O&G customers.  One area is with offshore drilling companies, where the delay in transaction availability at remote drilling locations can severely impact operations. 

Take, for example, Vantage Drilling – a global, offshore drilling company that operates and manages a fleet of modern, high specification drilling rigs on a worldwide basis.  Due to all these remote locations, they communicate over high latency satellite communications. The delay in getting transaction data severely impacts their operations.  So Vantage co-innovated with SAP to develop what they call the “SAP Always Available Platform”. The solution gives users the advantage of getting information instantly from a local subset of the company’s onshore databases while synchronization with the onshore data happens in the background.  Now all their SAP functionality is always available, anytime, anywhere.  They realized significant business results by saving on bandwidth, training, and Total Cost of Ownership, with much better business continuity.  They also saw accelerated user adoption using a simplified user interface.  Their next steps will be to implement predictive analytics and condition based maintenance on the platform.

Warren Wilson, industry analyst at Ovum, wrote an interesting article entitled, “Bridging the Offshore Data Gap”, that explores this and other approaches to solve the longstanding problem of poor quality of data communications between onshore and offshore oil and gas facilities.  Download the article here and let us know what you think.