Technology and concerns about staffing took center stage at last month's SPE/IADC Drilling exhibition & conference in Amsterdam. Jennifer Pallanich listened in as companies discussed how to remain competitive. Hint: it's mostly the people.
One factor in how to remain competitive is obtaining the best information. But, MA ‘Pete' Miller, chairman, president and CEO at National Oilwell Varco, asked: ‘How do you get that information and how do you ascertain the veracity of that information?'
To remain competitive, it's important to keep up with what is going on in the industry, said Total's VP of drilling and completions John Bannerman. It can be a tough task, he acknowledged: ‘There's a lot of literature written, but everybody's so busy we don't always read it.' As such, he added, ‘if you have a system that can manage your knowledge, you have a competitive advantage'.
On the whole, Miller concluded: ‘The biggest advantage you can have today is people that know what they're doing.' Several issues come into play: the aging workforce, the demand for experienced competency, and employers poaching employees from one another.
Bannerman said: ‘This was always a people business. This is a people business today, and I believe it will be a people business tomorrow.'
Kevin Robert, SVP for marketing and business development at Pride International, noted many countries have local content requirements for everything from materials to personnel. When a rig shifts from one country to another, he said, sometimes the rig crew is not able to move along with it due to the destination country's local content rules governing personnel.
‘It's a new frontier for us, trying to provide competency from experience that is not there,' Robert explained. For instance, he noted, Brazil has a major rig addition campaign going on that calls for vast numbers of rig workers. ‘The people do not exist. You cannot find the Brazilians. But that is not changing' the local staffing requirement for rigs off Brazil.
That combines with pressure from companies to whom the rigs are contracted. These companies have begun requesting succession plans for who picks up the shifts of sick workers, Robert said. Not only do the scheduled workers need to have the requisite skills and training and experience to carry out a job, so do the stand-ins.
Derek Mathieson, president of technology and product lines at Baker Hughes, said there seem to be ‘turf wars' in the battle to hire and keep employees in the middle of their careers. ‘We're seeing as much attrition to customers as to competitors,' he said. Once people are employed, he said, ‘there's a tidal wave of information and questions hitting us every day' in the form of emails and text messages. Handling the information, answering questions and carrying out the other tasks that are required under one's job description can leave people ‘juggling more things than they probably should be,' he said.
Maersk Drilling CEO Claus Hemmingsen said: ‘Technology plays an important role, but the advantage doesn't come from that alone.' As far as Hemmingsen is concerned, five areas work in concert to make a business competitive in the long-term. First, he said, comes hiring the right crew and providing them the appropriate training. Second is an in-house engineering department that can design the optimal and most functional rig layouts. Close cooperation across the organization to support its operation comes third, and fourth, a highly advanced management system that allows the company to follow performance across the fleet and synergies across functions. The final component, he said, is setting visible and measurable key performance indicators with customers.
‘It requires a high level of cooperation with the customer,' he added.
Another area that requires cooperation is technology collaboration between companies. This, speakers noted, would likely occur more often if intellectual property rights didn't muddy the waters. ‘These are issues that are very contentious,' said Satish Pai, VP of operations for Schlumberger Oilfield Services. Bannerman agreed, adding: ‘The only other thing I can think of is to fire all [the] lawyers. And I'm only partly joking!'
The service company culture may be a bit paranoid about not being the first to the market with a product, technology or service, Pai said. ‘Anytime we are not first, be really prepared that in two years' time, we will come out with something better than what's in the market,' he said. ‘At Schlumberger, thinking about being second or third drives us silly nuts.'
Risky business
The public tends to be more aware of the risks associated with drilling and producing hydrocarbons following last year's Macondo disaster in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. ‘It's hard to convey that we will never be a risk-free operation . . . there is always a risk . . . our job is to minimize the risk,' said Geir Slora, drilling SVP at Statoil.
David Williams, chairman, president and CEO at Noble Corporation, said: ‘In the wake of Macondo, we decided we needed to think about how we think about safety.' In the past, he noted, the industry could talk about safety and ‘nobody cared'. Now, it's the analysts who don't care, he said. But, ‘today we better all care about safety and process safety', he added.
Process safety is difficult to teach, Williams acknowledged, because while people may have the skills and knowledge needed to make the right decision, four out of five of them will ‘just choose to do something different'. As an example, he cited the number of people who routinely exceed posted speed limits. ‘It's human behavior to take risks,' he said. As such, Williams said, companies that want to improve safety need to focus on changing behavior, rather than the past focus on skills and training.
‘The integration of personal safety and process safety is something that we believe needs to be addressed,' Williams said. Also, he added, it's important to measure risk as well as safety. ‘We're looking at risk potential, not just outcomes.' OE
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