CASE STUDY

Accelerating Capital Projects with Cloud-enabled Process Automation

Client: ExxonMobil

$ 0 B

In revenue in 2022

0 K+

Employees

At a glance

Challenge

Innovate and transform how an American, multinational oil and gas corporation and its partners collaborate during major capital projects.

Result

Pariveda built an AWS, cloud-based, web-enabled application that automated previously manual work and helped ExxonMobil recognize new ways to optimize their overall process.

Impact

Pariveda’s solution has saved upwards of 30,000 engineering hours per project by reducing the amount of time people have had to facilitate the process, correct problems, edit documents, and more.

ExxonMobil is the largest investor-owned oil company in the world and the largest oil company headquartered in the Western world.

As an American multinational oil and gas corporation, ExxonMobil partners with contractors, sub-contractors, suppliers, and vendors in engineering, procurement, and construction in order to execute on major capital projects. When ExxonMobil saw an opportunity to use AWS to potentially save thousands of engineering hours through improved collaboration efficiencies, they knew it was an investment worth making.

Transforming collaboration on major capital projects for a world leader in oil and gas.

ExxonMobil’s document review process was ripe for better collaboration. Document review is a critical engineering workflow on major capital projects during which engineers review and approve controlled documents and drawings that define the design specifications. On average, a review team has four engineers and one lead reviewer with a contractually mandated service-level agreement of 10 days for each review. The engineers collaborate using multiple tools like document sharing and editing platforms, which means they spend additional time switching between these tools, decreasing productivity, and creating a negative user experience. Manual document routing could take up to one business day out of the service-level agreement time—longer in cases of business-interrupting events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic—reducing the amount of time for review and occasionally leading to bottlenecks in the workflow. The lead reviewer also rationalizes comments from the reviewing engineers, a time-consuming step before the final sign-off.

Pariveda helped ExxonMobil:

ExxonMobil estimates that real-time collaboration in their new collaboration platform now saves their engineers an equivalent of 30,000 hours per project, assuming there are 15,000 document reviews for a typical multibillion-dollar project.

Using the new collaboration platform, lead engineering reviewers can make real-time changes interactively with engineer reviewers rather than rationalizing changes. The platform is also a one-stop shop for document review, whereas review engineers previously used multiple tools to collaborate and review a document. ExxonMobil also expects the platform to save up to 40 percent of the document controller team’s time because the team no longer has to route documents manually, enabling ExxonMobil to reassign document controller team staff to other higher-value tasks. End-user experience was also a key success criterion for the platform, as alternative solutions that ExxonMobil had explored required additional training time. Through automation in the collaboration platform, the lead reviewer can now reduce the error rate caused by siloed reviews in a typical electronic document management process by 3-4 percent. This automation reduces the potential for errors and associated rework that otherwise might incur additional costs for each project.