Role of the Principal. Sheyi N. Lisk-Carew led the business process workstream through a consultancy engagement.

01The challenge

The operator wanted to understand what it would take to run an offshore gas facility remotely from shore, across both steady-state and process upset conditions, without losing reliability, availability or production efficiency.

That question sounds technical. It is mostly organisational. Every task currently done by a person on the platform either has to be automated, eliminated, or accepted as a reason someone must still be there.

02Role of the Principal

Business Process Workstream Lead. Led the business process workstream, later taking on day-to-day client relationship management and the design and delivery of the discovery workshop.

The work followed a simple sequence: establish what was documented, test it against what actually happened, then quantify the difference.

03Diagnostic findings

Around 80% of maintenance hours were going on corrective work. Fixing things after they had broken rather than before.

That is a cost line and a safety line at the same time, and it rarely appears in an investment model. Every corrective intervention on an offshore platform means a person, a permit, a boat or a helicopter.

A significant proportion of manual interventions existed because of instrumentation gaps rather than genuine operational necessity. Local resets, local set-point changes, visual checks that a camera or a sensor could do.

04Delivery and change

Workstream delivery. Built an opportunity list itemising every operations and maintenance activity on the platform, organised by system, with the modification required to eliminate or automate it, the estimated cost, the estimated benefit and the installation scope.

The maintenance strategy shifted towards predictive and preventive, using condition monitoring and analytics to identify what needed attention before it failed.

The output was specific enough to support a scope and budget for the electrical and instrumentation work, plus a roadmap towards normally unattended operation.

05Results

A complete map of every manual intervention on the facility, costed and prioritised.
A maintenance strategy moving from ~80% corrective towards predictive and preventive, with the instrumentation required to support it.
A defined roadmap towards minimal-personnel and ultimately normally unattended operation.
Recommendations for revising operations and maintenance practices, separate from the equipment modifications.
Client and asset are not named. The underlying material is confidential.