Russian oil and gas company Tatneft has built a new workflow management system as well as a remote monitoring and automation control of equipment assets across its oil and gas installations in Russia with leading communication solution provider Hytera.
As one of the largest Russian oil and gas groups, Tatneft has nine crude oil and gas production facilities, seven oilfields and 23,000 production wells, which spread over a huge area, so providing reliable voice and data transmissions between all the sites was challenging.
At the beginning of 2017, Tatneft decided to overcome its communications problem through digitalization. A key part of Tatneft’s digitalization strategy was to develop closer integration between its planning and management processes.
One of the most important management processes the company wanted to digitize was the workflow management process plan, enabling it to monitor employee progress in real time and improve productivity. It also wanted to implement remote monitoring and automatic control of its oil production equipment.
The existing application for monitoring the implementation of the work plan was carried out using LTE and Wi-Fi data networks, but these were unsatisfactory due to their limited coverage. At the same time, the company did have an existing TETRA PMR network in operation covering more than 90% of the territory. However, this network was not being used to transmit data information or messaging from the work plan monitoring application, so this required a separate portable terminal.
As such, a disagreement arose over whether to invest in TETRA two-way radio terminals or in cellular smart phones. Hytera‘s Russia office was able to solve the problem and keep both departments happy by suggesting that Tatneft use the Hytera PTC760 multi-mode advanced terminal, which supports both TETRA and LTE, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
More than 1,200 Hytera multi-mode terminals and large quantities of Hytera TETRA radios were supplied to the oil and gas group.
Hytera provided a Control Center Automated System to install different applications on PTC760. The workflow management application assigns tasks for each employee. Employees send back a message acknowledging receipt of the task and send another one on completion of the job.
The application enabled remote monitoring of every type of worker including operators, supervisors, dispatchers and executives with the current status of their tasks. This continuous monitoring of the employees’ enables managers implementation to keep track of all the tasks in the daily work plan.
The PTC760 smart radio allows users to make and receive calls and data from broadband LTE and Wi-Fi networks and the narrowband TETRA network. It also supports the data application for monitoring the implementation of the work plan. Usually the application exchanges data with the control center via LTE and Wi-Fi as the primary networks, but if these are not available the data can still be transmitted via the IP-based TETRA network backbone.
With the implementation of the converged broadband LTE and narrowband TETRA solution and multi-mode radio terminals, Tatneft has been able to advance the digitalization of its workflow management processes and improve work efficiency from employee end and management end.
