Client Background

Client: bp

Industry: Oil and Gas

Products/Services/Core Business: Oil, Gas, Renewable energy

Geo: Global

Challenge

bp, one of the largest companies in the energy industry, manages an expansive network of assets across its global enterprise. The oil and gas leader recognized an opportunity to reduce maintenance spending and OPEX costs by modernizing, standardizing and optimizing its advanced asset performance management (APM) solution. The company’s existing APM spanned 10+ business units, with assistance from a central reliability and integrity team. Upgrading the system for asset reliability and integrity across its refining and petrochemical businesses would enable bp to improve performance, simplify and standardize workflows, and improve the user interface.

Implementing these technologies would increase asset availability, reduce maintenance cost, and minimize unplanned downtime. This combined approach of APM upgrades and predictive technologies promised to optimize how bp employees performed asset maintenance and supported IT infrastructure and applications, reducing the time required to complete critical activities and, ultimately, reducing costs. 

Solution

Wipro modernized the legacy APM solution by upgrading it to a web-based platform on AWS cloud. This migration leveraged a DevOps model, automation, cloud-native services and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) to ensure a swift implementation. The upgraded web-based solution gave bp a more modern cloud-based architecture, with enhanced features that were more intuitive, faster, and free of performance issues.

Wipro also standardized the business workflow for integrity and reliability modules within the APM solution, enabling bp to optimize efforts and cost for reliability and integrity management. Meanwhile, the use of predictive technologies improved the overall reliability of assets and increased plant availability. 

Business Impact

With a standardized workflow, bp realized smoother operations, increased efficiency, and more effective collaboration across its business. In addition, moving to a cloud infrastructure improved performance by offering 80% faster calculations and analysis through risk-based inspection/thickness monitoring. The new APM solution also boosted reliability by minimizing asset downtime. bp achieved its cost-savings objectives in several areas. Standardized work processes across all sites enabled bp to achieve an overall 20% cost reduction, while migrating the infrastructure to cloud led to a 30% reduction in IT infrastructure costs. And with automation and CI/CD implementation, the solution enabled IT support cost savings of 20%.