Deepwater Nigeria Integrated Activity Planning (IAP): A Key Lever to Competitive Optimization and Consistent Business Performance

Abstract While a robust business plan forms the bedrock for setting the goals and aspirations of the SNEPCo Deepwater (DW) portfolio over a long-term time horizon, the purpose of the Integrated Activity Planning & Scheduling (IAPS) process is to integrate, prioritize, optimize, and check readiness of activities to be carried out by functions on the DW asset as prescribed in the business plan to enable effective and efficient execution of work. These activities impact safety, production, capacity, cost, and simultaneous operations and rely on the IAPS process as the major driver for an integrated delivery. The plan outputs include deliverables such as Supply Chain demand profiles, Asset wide integrated Turnaround plans, activity readiness, scenarios and the impact of various threats and opportunities. The plan sets out the asset and functions’ Programme of work together with the activity timings, i.e. execution windows directly supporting their business targets, business plan submission and latest estimates of cost and production. The objective of the DW IAPS is to maximize business value and mitigate risks to the asset by delivering: Goal Zero (Personal and Process Safety) by planning conflicting activities at different times to minimize exposure to personal and process safety events.Top quartile availability by integrating activities that cause deferment and reduce facility downtime.Cost competitiveness by optimizing the use of critical resources.Environmental Stewardship / Regulatory Compliance. Since IAPS was introduced in SNEPCo 10 years ago, the asset has undertaken a bespoke efficiency improvement journey in delivering real value to the DW asset, ensuring a consistent top-quartile performance in key safety, production and activity-driven metrics year-on-year. Leveraging the integrating role of the IAPS workstream, several performance enhancing and IT-enabled simplification initiatives have been adopted over the years to ensure a competitive outcome for the asset as prescribed in the business plan. This paper summarizes the strategies, concepts and systems developed and deployed over the years to deliver a robust IAPS process that effectively supports integrated management of SNEPCO’s deepwater activities. The paper will highlight the challenges, opportunities, and improvement scopes for the IAPS process as well as learnings derived from a decade of IAPS operations in the SNEPCo Deepwater business.