Norway working as a team
15 Jan 2000
The Norwegian state-owned company Statoil operates the Asgard B platform, the largest floating gas platform in the world and due on stream next year.
Statoil places great emphasis on close relations with its suppliers. The platform consists of hundreds of thousand of components that must be manufactured or procured, and brought together for fabrication. During its 30 year life, the platform will undergo several changes of process or use, each of which involves engineering redesign, more procurement and revamp. Statoil needed an approach that:
* integrated data from a wide variety of legacy sources and organisations;
* separated the data from the systems that created, updated or used it;
* permitted applications to interoperate, so users could exchange and share data.
It adopted a data warehouse approach based on a POSC/Caesar data model and the Intergraph Notia solution. The model holds data in a highly `normalised form'. This means that data to describe, say, a pump comprises many other linked data objects.
When populated with data that describes all materials, equipment and activities associated with Asgard B, the data warehouse becomes a single source of plant information that can be used by all concerned with the platform during its entire life. All data added to the warehouse is validated on entry for quality and referential integrity - and is then retained for the lifetime of the plant.
Statoil's main aim was to implement a standards-based structure for plant information. Web-based information-sharing to support its supply chain was a key element.. Whilst it is too early to measure savings, Statoil expects to save more than 10 per cent of investment costs over the entire life cycle.
