Case Studies: Oil and Gas
BP Grangemouth

The Background: Largest Industrial Complex in Scotland
In Grangemouth, near Edinburgh, BP operates a refining and petrochemicals complex, the largest industrial site in Scotland. This site handles oil and gas processing and transportation for many of the fields in the North Sea, receiving and processing in excess of 1m barrels of crude oil per day. The petrochemical businesses manufacture many diverse derivative products.

The Challenge: Understand Alignment to Drive Efficiency
With the exploration of new oil fields across the globe, the Grangemouth complex needs to operate in a highly competitive environment, yet the maturity of the site gives rise to many legacy systems operating across functional areas.  This restricts the speed of change necessary to gain competitive advantage.  BP needed to understand the interaction of systems, real-time data-flows, and its business processes to create a basis for its Digital Business Strategy, whose goal was to create a more efficient platform to manage and streamline change within a HSE controlled environment.

The Solution: Stroma^® and OBASHI
The key objective of the delivery of Stroma^® was to highlight vulnerabilities within the IT infrastructure in line with the Digital Business Strategy, working with the BP Grangemouth Review Teams to ensure that all BP vulnerability was identified.

Our predefined goals were to enable the tracking of dataflows, enhance the Change Control process, help manage Risk Assessment and Planning and allow for redundancy management – all of which were achieved.

With BP Grangemouth being directly linked to upstream oil exploration there is always real and tangible risk of halting the North Sea oil production if critical systems are interrupted. Paramount from a HSE and HM Customs and Excise perspective is for real-time data to be non-intermittent, as all hydro-carbons need to be accounted for at every stage. This can understandably lead to a culture whereby legacy systems are not decommissioned.  Creating the Stroma^® Model uncovered equipment and systems which were no longer used operationally by the Business.  Systems were turned off, hardware was recycled, support contracts were cancelled and cost savings were achieved.

By understanding the impact of IT on the Business the Change Control process was improved.  The time taken to induct new IT Professionals to the BP complex was reduced – key within an outsourced environment to gain value for money.

By using Stroma^® BP could visualize their IT resources and understand the alignment of IT with the business – the picture on top of the jigsaw box.

Real Results: Cost Savings and Delivered Benefits
By using Stroma^®, BP was able to:

• reduce vulnerability
• increase understanding
• highlight redundancy
• highlight potential areas of consolidation
• prioritise and co-ordinate remedial projects
• identify insufficient support
• formulate  disaster recovery
• enable knowledge management – capturing corporate knowledge base

Stroma^® created a foundation for next phases of investment for the Digital Business Strategy in the largest Petrochemical complex in Scotland.

Put succinctly by a  BP Business Manager - “Stroma^® is the missing link in IT”