Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) has officially honoured 50 staff for their efforts in driving efficiency across the business.
The employees have been formally accredited as ‘Lean’ practitioners for implementing projects which have eradicated waste and unnecessary or uneconomic work practices.
Their success is contributing to multi-million dollar savings and helping free up time for more productive tasks and activities.
The staff gave presentations to members of PDO’s Managing Director’s Committee on their individual projects before being awarded certificates to mark their official international accreditation as Lean practitioners.
Their work has led to work improvements across the full spectrum of the Company’s work from subsurface activities through to support services, such as recruitment.
PDO Managing Director Raoul Restucci said: “I congratulate all our Lean practitioners who have become agents for change and transforming the way we work.
“Their Lean initiatives have helped us to simplify our work processes, reduce costs, strip out red tape and waste so that we deliver more value for Oman.
“We now have 160 Lean practitioners in PDO who are leading by example and empowering colleagues to participate in our business improvement journey. Their projects are making a real difference to how we do things, are sustainable and can be replicated elsewhere in our organisation and beyond.”
One project showcased a standardisation of well and reservoir management surveillance, which has increased oil production, cut costs and halved work times, and can be used in all reservoir types. Another has led to the automation of PDO’s well-testing system in Nimr, freeing up the time of programmers who previously had to manually validate tests.
Lean originated with Toyota in Japan as a means of driving efficiency across the value chain by making, often small-scale, changes and has since been further refined into a system used by businesses across the world aiming to do more for less.
PDO first introduced the new ways of working in 2009 and has since rolled it out across all aspects of the business, streamlining work procedures and driving continuous business improvement across the organisation.
One of the outstanding successes of the Company’s use of Lean has come in the Lekhwair cluster, where visual management boards charting the status of key operational areas have been introduced to encourage staff and contractors to interact, engage and collaborate more.
This system, which is now being replicated across other assets, has helped to raise the 24-year-old field’s production by 9.6% from January-November 2015 to a record of 71,700 barrels per day (bpd) from 63,600 bpd and reduced unscheduled deferments from by more than 85%.
PDO’s growing reputation as a Lean pioneer in Oman was evidenced last year by several high-profile fact-finding visits from several regional operating units and domestic private and public sector organisations to learn from the Company’s Lean deployment programme.
Other visitors have included the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Environment and Climate Affairs (MECA), who have now started improvement projects with PDO support, and the Royal Hospital which is considering implementing Lean in its emergency response, operation theatre and oncology departments and has asked for PDO guidance and support.
Two PDO Lean practitioners were also honoured for achieving “Lean Green Belt” accreditation.
