Intranet Development for an International 5,000-Employee Oil and Gas Company

Customer

The Customer specializes in exploration and production drilling of oil and gas wells, directional drilling, sidetracking, well cementation and mud elaboration and support. The company’s clients are established international organizations focused on oil and gas production. The combination of high tech equipment, advanced technologies and highly qualified personnel allows the Customer to offer fast and efficient services to customers around the world.

Challenge

Starting its production activity in 2000 with only one branch, the Customer expanded its presence quickly across 7 different regions, accomplishing up to 1+ mln miles of exploration and production drilling and over 3,000 well overhauls annually. With this business expansion, the number of staff increased significantly and hit the threshold of 5,000+ employees located in 30 distributed offices.

At such an impressive scale, the company was still operating with no centralized document management and collaboration solution, which had a negative impact on the employees’ general productivity, especially when it came to cross-departmental interaction.

Wishing to create a unified corporate portal, improve internal communication and consolidate employees from different offices and departments, the Customer turned to ScienceSoft to develop a solution that could meet these goals.

Solution

After analyzing the Customer’s corporate structure and existing approach to project management, ScienceSoft’s team offered to develop a corporate SharePoint intranet, chosen as the optimal platform to address the Customer’s needs.

The intranet includes the following features:

• Corporate document management. In order to structure the document management process, all current documents were imported into the system. They were attributed with content types and arranged in libraries to build a logical and easy-to-use file storage. Custom document workflows were introduced to facilitate document processing.
• Project management. The intranet became a centralized project management platform by providing dedicated workspaces for each project team and department. It now enables PMs to manage the entire project in one location, e.g. store project documentation, instantly share files with teams, discuss project-related issues in real time and distribute personal tasks during the project cycle.
• Departmental management. The intranet includes a number of department sites that allow employees manage their activities without mixing them with those of other departments. Each department site is only available for users from the respective department.
• Enterprise search. Relying on the platform’s strong out-of-the-box search capabilities, ScienceSoft customized SharePoint enterprise search to provide employees with easy access to internal data and documents. The implemented system allows employees to make a quick search within the document libraries of the corporate intranet by criteria that are based on metadata associated with each document. The system uses taxonomic terms to ensure precise search results.
• Technical reference. Due to the industrial specifics of the Customer’s business, there were a large number of standards and regulations to follow throughout the project cycle. Paper versions of standards and regulations were digitalized and placed into the dedicated reference database to allow the teams access necessary documents at any project stage.
• Forums, polls and surveys. To encourage internal communication, foster the corporate culture and team spirit, ScienceSoft developed microblogs, polls and discussion forums. To allow the HR managers to assess the employees’ satisfaction and engagement level, the team also introduced a dedicated survey system.
• Internal corporate portal and associated content management system. The corporate portal was developed as a central hub displaying the company’s activities: news, announcements, corporate events, organizational charts, corporate policies, etc. The user-friendly content management system enables easy content adding, editing and deleting. To ensure the corporate culture consistency, the website was designed in compliance with the Customer’s corporate style.

After successfully implementing and launching the portal components, ScienceSoft started out the support stage to handle the Customer’s change requests and new requirements for further development of the corporate system. During support, ScienceSoft have additionally created a corporate calendar, informers and social tools (wiki pages and a corporate chat), personal and team sites.

Results

The implementation of the corporate intranet allowed the Customer to reach several vital goals:

• Structuring of scattered documentation and providing employees with a single access point to corporate information via a reliable system for project and content management.
• Increase in the company’s general productivity due to centralization of major working processes, which ensured quality communication with end clients and speeded up the project cycle.
• Increased efficiency of information management processes, boosted internal communication and higher adoption of corporate culture throughout the entire organization.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft SharePoint Server, jQuery, Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft SharePoint Designer, WSP Builder, VSTO.