ENERGY | DATA MANAGEMENT
such as Oracle Content Management
and Oracle Self-Service Human
Resources, while continuing to leverage
advanced features from Oracle products
that it already owns—such as Oracle
Financials and Oracle Human Resources
Management—as well as upgrading to
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 and
the newest version of Oracle Discoverer,
and moving to Linux. Trahan says most
of Diamond’s international offices in
Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Egypt
are scheduled to implement Oracle
Financials to achieve more enterprisewide
synergy among the groups by ensuring clearer, more-detailed information.
“As we move people internationally,
the global groups are demanding that
we expand the resources,” says Trahan.
“Oracle’s global capabilities make it a
company that’s well suited to solve these
issues and maximize the effect of limited
human capital resources.”
MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE
Trahan says that a number of mergers
defined Diamond’s growth from 1990 to
1996 to make the company the largest
offshore driller in the world at the time.
But with that growth came several complications—for example, the company’s
software could not track the increased
number of legal entities independent of
each other on an ongoing basis. Further
motivating Diamond to change solutions
was the fact that his company’s software
at that time was not Y2K-compliant—an
issue that was just four years away.
“Y2K made the decision to switch solutions easier, but the software from Chris
Schaefer, Inc., was being pushed well
past its capabilities,” says Trahan.
Diamond’s team began looking at
various vendors, including Oracle and
SAP. Trahan said while other vendors displayed “fancy stuff,” Oracle’s team simply
focused on the basics. “As it turns out,”
says Trahan, “Oracle Financials was just
superior to everyone else’s offering and
the right fit for us.”
Only recently have oil companies
had the technologies to transition from
a reactive to a more-predictive business
model. According to Heagney, oil companies want to stop the pattern of waiting
idly for their 100-horsepower electric
motors, which are pumping oil out of
the ground nonstop, to simply fail. “How
you get ahead of the drill bit is both a
common question and a reality in the
drilling organization,” says Heagney. “In
the case of the motor pump, companies
are starting to use Oracle analytics tools
in combination with sensors placed
on these motors to monitor vibration
levels that indicate when the unit will
fail. Oracle has the tools that allow for
sophisticated production processes to
pull these analytics together in real time.”
Heagney sees smart analytics tools
coupled with a robust database as the
cornerstone to solving the data management problem. “The need to know what
seismic data is available, for instance,
and its spatial components must fit
properly into a database, otherwise the
data can’t be located effectively,” he says.
“Oracle, which has at least 90 percent
market penetration of its database
product in the oil and gas industry, has
done a great job with these complicated
data issues to improve the ease of use of
its products to develop meaningful business analytics.”
>>SNAPSHOT
Diamond Offshore Drilling
www.diamondoffshore.com
Location: Houston, Texas
Does business in: Africa, Asia,
Australia, Europe, North America,
and South America
Employees: Approximately 5,000
Oracle products and services:
Oracle E-Business Suite 11. 5. 10,
including Financials, Purchasing,
Project Costing, Project Billing, and
Human Resources Management;
Oracle Application Server; Oracle
Business Intelligence; Oracle
Developer Suite; Oracle Forms;
Oracle Reports Developer; Oracle
Discoverer; Oracle9i Database
Other products and services:
Juniper Networks Intrusion
Detection and Prevention and
Juniper Networks Firewall; NetApp
network-attached storage; HP UNIX
(implementing Linux)
NEED FOR A GLOBAL SOLUTION
Trahan believes that the cyclical nature
of the drilling business, the challenge
of managing import rules, and the fact
that Diamond’s rigs might only be in one
place for a limited time require solutions
that are portable and capable of realizing
a return on investment. Drilling companies often enter a country, drill a well for
an oil and gas company, and exit in just
a few months.
The lack of an established IT infrastructure to support rigs, which can
only be accessed by boat or helicopter,
requires flexible solutions that allow for
planning and ingenuity to overcome
information challenges. “One of the big
challenges of managing remote mobile
rigs is that they rarely stay put in any one
drilling site for more than 90 days,” says
Trahan. “The operation group needs more
help from support groups, including IS
[information systems], to get their job
done. Unfortunately, we also have fewer
resources at our disposal to help in some
remote locations around the world.”
Because Diamond is a global organization that routinely moves rigs between
countries, Oracle Financial’s Multiple
Reporting Currencies feature, which
handles currency conversion rates and
can translate a purchase order from
one currency to another and still report
everything in U.S. dollars, was invaluable
to Diamond’s business needs. “When you
move a rig between any two countries or
purchase items in multiple countries for
a rig, Oracle’s ability to handle multiple
currencies and automatically roll up to
U.S. dollars in our books brings great
value to us,” says Trahan. “The local
operation reports in their currency and
we report in U.S. dollars, even if the item
was purchased in a third currency.”
EFFICIENT OPERATIONS
Oracle enabled Trahan’s IT staff to
become more efficient by providing one
set of development tools. “It’s impossible
to shift people between projects when
those projects are built using different
tools—that would become a complicated
skills issue for a small shop like us,” says
Trahan. Using Oracle tools, Trahan’s team
was able to write custom solutions that
