ADOPTING ENGINEERING STANDARDS FOR AN OIL & GAS (PETROLEUM) COMPANY USING BENCHMARKING & GAP ANALYSIS

Abstract

Engineering Standards are documents that provide the basis for common and repeated use the minimum meeting requirements of a system or equipment. Engineering Standards form the backbone of Oil & Gas industry and are used to ensure consistency, reduce cost and improve efficiency and effectiveness of the company. Thus to build and maintain plant facilities, the companies requires a standardization system (the process of developing and implementing engineering standards) which helps to maximize compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability and quality. This study is based on a National Oil & Gas company (Company A) which used to have its own set of engineering standards and currently has an agreement with an International Oil company (Company B) for using their set of engineering standards. Since the agreement is expiring soon, Company A is in search of selecting the best option and is keen to study standardization and gaps from available options. In this study, the identities of companies are not being disclosed due to confidentiality clauses and instead the term Company A and Company B were used. The period taken to carry out this study was four months and it was carried out in Engineering Department of Company A. The objective of this study is to capture evolution process regarding application of engineering standards till date in Company A which requires an understanding of the justifications for technical adoption of standards. It also requires analyzing different available options for Company A adoption and selecting the most viable option and finally developing an implementation guideline for Company A for selected option. On expiry of the agreement, Company A has three viable options: 1. Use Company A or Company B standards on standalone basis 2. Renew its agreement with Company B 3. Develop a new set of company standards The Methodology used was first to benchmark Company A against Company B, followed by carrying out a gap analysis between standards by preparing survey questionnaire to get acceptability of standards as per available options. The questionnaire was distributed to selected sample of engineers. Data was received from 51 respondents and was analyzed using statistical tools (SPSS & Excel). Based on the analysis results, an option was selected and an implementation guideline was developed for selected option. After conducting this study, it can be concluded that option 1 can be removed since neither Company A nor Company B standards were complete and both had gaps. A detailed analysis was carried out on the remaining two options by using three kind of analysis: general, business & cost analysis. From these analyses, it was found that the second option was the best option for Company A and that was to renew the agreement with Company B for fulfilling its standards requirements. In the last part of the study, an implementation guideline for Company A has been developed for adoption of the selected option.