AGR Asia Pacific is an Australian and Asian integrated oil and gas service provider. AGR-AP manage, engineer and service offshore and onshore oil and gas production facilities throughout their life cycle. From exploration and appraisal drilling, through to full field development, production and final abandonment.
AGR specialise in assisting oil companies with low cost, fast track commercialisation of hydrocarbon resources using leading edge technologies and world class processes.
Solution
By embracing custom development rather than off-the-shelf applications, Newpath WEB was able to spec out and build an online document exchange that would provide a common repository for Upstream’s documents.
Designed and built with a custom Web interface and MySQL database backend, the new exchange was fast-tracked and completed within just three weeks. “Normally, says Prescott, developing, testing and refining such a significant project would have taken up to three months”.
Hosted from Newpath WEB facilities in Australia, the document exchange was put through heavy usage during the course of the project, which ran through the second half of 2006 and involved the regular transmission of many gigabytes of data. Rapid turnaround in the delivery of the system proved incredibly valuable for Upstream.
One of the most valuable parts of Upstream’s new content management system was that it not only enabled upload and download of project documents, but also tied in with the broader scope of work that Newpath WEB was also performing for the company. This included a fully featured Website, with everything from corporate policies and organisation charts to information on procurement, vacant positions, system processes and other corporate information.
Newpath WEB built the entire site around an easy to use editing tool that let employees update the Websites quickly and easily. Building on the site, the company has also developed tools such as an e-mail signature generator, which produces consistent employee e-mail signatures according to a single common style. Another development included a job ad generator, which integrates with Upstream’s career management system to automatically extract and format job-wanted ads as HTML code for publication on third-party employment sites.
Online Marketing, specifically SEO & SEM was also an element that was included in the project, with results producing an increase in traffic by 1500% to the site within the first 3 months.
Having taken the company from a manual and inefficient email based method of collaboration to full online publishing and document sharing in just a short while, AGR is predictably enthused about the results of project and the long-term benefits it will deliver to the company.
Such innovations have helped Upstream greatly improve employee participation in the online conveyance of information. And, given its massive success in saving time and money on the Crystellation refit, the system is now being considered for a broader use within the company, with plans to roll the application in with its own Microsoft SharePoint Server environment, developing it for use by partners and other subsidiaries worldwide.
