The CRINE Initiative - Producing the Engine&ing Tools (Functional Specifications and Common Working Practices)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Alongside culture change, CRINE's other challenge is producing the right tools for the North Sea industry to change its traditional method of operation. These tools cover functional specifications, common working practices and quality. Turning these tools into deliverables, and on time, was a mixture of painstaking work and willingness by people to adapt to the needs of the task. INTRODUCTION CRINE, an acronym for Cost Reduction Initiative for the New Era, is an industry-wide programme now under way in the UK Continental Shelf oil and gas fields whose main objective is to achieve thirty per cent or more savings in capital costs and to halve operating costs over the next two or three years. This will be achieved without prejudicing safety or protection of the environment, whilst ensuring economic extraction of remaining recoverable reserves. Also, through a change in attitudes and working practices, CRINE has strengthened the UK offshore industry's competitiveness worldwide and within the UK industry will sustain employment at ahigher level than previously forecast. There are four papers: the first explains the background and how the initiative was developed. The second is about the cultural change needed to gain acceptance for the new ideas. This, the third covers the ‘tools’ needed to make change possible: specifications, practices, quality/performance. The fourth concerns the education/ training programmethat will ensure the lessons learned stay learned. PRODUCING THE ENGINEERING TOOLS This paper deals primarily with the preparation of some of the tools by which the CRINE initiative willbe implemented. Early on, it was recognised that these were the crucial elements - alongside the culture change - for turning round an industry that was technically sound but had a reputation of being extremely expensive. The critical self-examination during 1993 identified what was wrong with the UK operation in the North Sea and proposed a detailed set of recommendations to resolve the situation. These are outlined in the keynote CRINE paper by Mike Curtis, Chairman of the Steering Committee. Put simply, none of these changes, themselves, were particularly innovative or untested; what was unusual isthe fact that they would be ineffective unless everyone involved in the North Sea agreed to them. The talking was now over - we had to deliver. But what, and how? Fig. 1 describes how we felt when we began to tackle this delivery phase of the project. My job here is to explain what some of the tools are, their delivery and the ways of working them. First, I need to put some flesh on the CRINE structure given by Mike Curtis in the first paper (Fig. 2). Given the ‘green light’ at the first CRINE conference in 1993 to get ahead fast with the recommendations, we set about changing the structure of the organisation itself. We wanted to change from being a fact-gathering organisation into one that properly represented all the interested parties and in a form that could deliver the deliverables. First, CRINE'S steering committee was re-shaped so that now it has very senior members from all sides of industry.