Maintenance planning innovation: realising planning and execution efficiencies through process and digital transformation

Abstract

As oil and gas facilities age, the need to allocate finite planning effort across mounting scopes of work increases. Woodside has tackled this problem head-on, seeking innovative solutions to reduce waste in deploying low-complexity asset maintenance. Through its Accelerator Programme, Woodside has employed new capabilities – such as enterprise design thinking and agile at scale delivery – conducting over 200 interviews and prototype tests to deeply understand maintenance priorities and identify opportunities to realise value, organisation wide. The result is an in-house scope management application, which supports the end-to-end maintenance planning workflow. The application considers multiple data points on thousands of work orders in seconds, using a sophisticated algorithm to incorporate industry knowledge and business priorities specific to Woodsides’ needs. The application produces a maintenance plan optimised by understanding location, equipment and process efficiency drivers to ensure the best utilisation of resources. The embedding of intelligent automation represents a cultural shift, enabling a move towards a more dynamic maintenance planning process that responds to changing asset priorities. Currently, 41% of all North-West Shelf Gas Project scopes are managed through the application. A 95% reduction in selection time and a 90% reduction in overall planning duration have been realised from this initiative. By releasing valuable planning effort back to the business to focus on complex scope, Woodside can realise and maintain safe, reliable and efficient operations in a low-cost, variable environment.