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Cimage adds value to the quality and completeness of AMEC’s data

AMEC is an international engineering services company providing design, project delivery and support for oil and gas, transport, infrastructure and industrial clients. The company generates revenues in excess of £5.5 billion and employs 50,000 people world-wide.

In upstream, AMEC Oil and Gas has market-leading positions in engineering and project management, integration of complex topsides and operations and maintenance services on projects including Shell – Bonga, Malampaya, Shearwater, Sigma 3 and Muskeg River Oil Sands, BP – Federal, Claire, Mad Dog and ACG3, ExxonMobil - Kizomba, Skene, British Gas and many others.

In downstream, the company is recognised for its global expertise in gas processing and operations and maintenance, working with BP, Sinopec, Saudi Aramco and others; whilst in pipelines, the group is one of the world's leading large-diameter pipeline contractors working with EnCana, ExxonMobil, Trans Canada Pipelines, Suncor and BTC Pipeline Company.

The Challenge

A typical AMEC EPC project has to manage in the region of up to 100,000 documents and it is estimated that some 2.5 million single document transactions will take place during that product cycle. If each of these transactions were to take 10 minutes this process could consume around 400,000 man hours.

One of the biggest challenges is reducing business process cycle time involving documents and data across a globally distributed engineering services organisation. Just how do you cut time and cost safely from complex, multi-contractor projects fragmented across centres of excellence dispersed across Canada to the UK and India?

Finally, AMEC constantly needs to exchange documents and data with their customers, each of whom may have totally different document and data structures, processes and systems of their own. In the past, mapping, cleansing and completing the information hand over to the owner operator of a facility was a major project in its own right which could easily cost significant sums of money.

The Solution

AMEC set up a business group comprised of line managers and document controllers to support the AMEC Information Management process. After a lengthy review and selection process Cimage was chosen as the preferred solution for technical document management on all projects and the Information Management business group created an Open Re-Usable Business Information Step Structure. The Cimage component of this system has been configured to meet AMEC’s requirements, without the need for customisation of the code.

Cimage has been providing and supporting solutions in the Oil and Gas Industry for over 10 years and has a full understanding of industry requirements for document management & workflow solutions.

A typical project has multiple execution centres in multiple countries. All document formats are stored in Cimage: drawings, SOP’s, P&ID’s, maintenance manuals, vendor documents, structural reports and management documentation plus invoice processing etc. AMEC are now able to update dynamically whatever EDM is being used by their customer during the course of a project which gives the owner / operator early visibility of project work and greatly reduces the work required at handover.

“By constantly gathering and checking throughout the project time-line AMEC can knock down the ‘wall’ of information volume which can frustrate a project handover’s success. Receiving data in the right format, at the right time adds value to the quality and completeness of the data.” explains Pete Mayhew, AMEC Oil & Gas Information Manager.

Access to documents held within the Cimage repository is given to AMEC users via Cimage’s browser-based client application enabling AMEC projects to set up users rapidly across multiple, geographically-dispersed locations and provides each project with its own web space. AMEC is also now using Cimage internally for accounts, human resources, bids & proposals and work unit tracking.

AMEC has access to information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and Cimage allows work to be managed across AMEC’s global network of specialist engineering services centres. “Cimage allows us to distribute project work effectively. Low value work can be done at low costs in cheaper operational centres and high value work can take place in London offices making it more cost effective. We could not operate in the way we need to without Cimage”.

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