BP Bruce Optimizes Efficiency with OPTIMUS

BP Exploration's Bruce field produces 70,000 barrels of oil and 20 million cubic feet of gas per day. It does this from 29 production wells via a 20,000 ton process platform resting on a 400 foot tall 9,500 ton steel jacket. This is connected by a bridge to a 7,100 ton drilling platform supported by a 7,800 ton jacket.

Both platforms are situated in the UK sector of the North Sea approximately 340 km north east of Aberdeen. The platform is the temporary home to 160 production, maintenance and drilling staff. The Bruce field, in conjunction with the numerous other BP installations in the sector, make BP Exploration one of the major oil and gas producing operators in the UK.

The field produced first oil in 1993. To maintain their record as a safe and efficient offshore operator in an environment of increasing change and declining operating budgets, the Bruce operations team needed to devise a reliable management system to deliver the latest engineering and maintenance documentation to offshore. The system would have to demonstrate to the regulatory authorities the technical integrity of information used to maintain the platform which would assist in securing the license to operate.

Like all offshore installations, Bruce has hundreds of thousands of drawings, specifications, manuals, equipment tags, cable numbers and other engineering information used to operate and maintain the platform. All of this information is related in various ways and the information and relationships often change. The challenge for any information management system is keeping all this data current and available to users both on and off-shore in an economic and secure manner.

To meet this technological challenge BP created OPTIMUS - Operations Technical Information Management User System. An engineering data management system designed with a client/server architecture around a Sybase RDBMS controlled by a Cimage Document Manager Server. OPTIMUS handles revision control and security access to all engineering records, drawings, data sheets, cable and equipment schedules. It provides 75 users on-shore and off-shore with this access via the Cimage Windows Desktop product to view, mark-up, edit and print over 80,000 engineering drawings, 90,000 equipment tags, 20,000 cable numbers and 120,000 other engineering data records.

With the system operational and available off-shore and at BP's headquarters in Aberdeen, the next step was to expand the system by Wide Area Network to AMEC Process and Energy, Ltd., who are BP's engineering partners for the Bruce field. AMEC are responsible for maintaining the technical integrity of the data held in the system. OPTIMUS is now used extensively by AMEC engineers and drawing office staff to validate information for ongoing modifications and to create new documents illustrating these changes for use by offshore construction teams.

OPTIMUS operates with dual UNIX file servers onshore and offshore which are kept synchronized by the Cimage Remote Database Manager with the master database server in Aberdeen. The system has been integrated with BP's En-Garde Maintenance Management System used for routine maintenance planning and scheduling.

Users can access the information contained in OPTIMUS through a customized Windows interface or through the En-Garde interface. The single database for both systems delivers substantial cost benefits in upkeep and administration and ensures the referential integrity of both systems are secure. This approach meets BP's concept of "Data for Life" where information is input to the system once and used for the life of the field with no duplication.

By streamlining the way BP and their engineering partners manage constant change, the system delivers significant manpower savings, reduced maintenance cost, improved operational safety and production performance.

Further enhancements are being planned to extend the data held by OPTIMUS to add the many equipment maintenance routines and modification specifications generated on word processing packages to the system in their native form. This will allow them to be distributed to users offshore without having to resort to multiple paper copies.