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. When the firm faced a logistics issue, concerning the coordination of a AU$100 million ship refit across nearly 40 subcontractors in three countries, they began discussions with long-time partner Newpath Web to address this through the use of technology.
Eliminating the risk of delays was of utmost importance and AGR was looking for a concrete way to communicate between teams — using emails was slow and raised retransmission issues due to the sheer volume of information coursing through each email thread.
Hence, Newpath Web embraced Microsoft SharePoint and custom development to answer these very needs; building an online document exchange that would provide a common repository for AGR’s documents.
The document exchange was put through heavy usage during the course of the 6 month project, and involved the regular transmission of many gigabytes of data.
The document exchange fit in with AGR’s public website, allowing for a secure login to a backend where all parties concerned could upload and download documents much faster. The company began using the system from the beginning of the six-month refit and it quickly proved popular with all parties concerned. This rapid turnaround in the delivery of the system proved incredibly valuable for AGR.
Designed and built with a bespoke new website, fresh UI (User Interface) MSSQL database backend, the new document sharing solution was fast-tracked and completed on time in just under 6 months.
This new content management system tied in well with the broader scope of work that Newpath Web was already performing for the company — a fully featured website, with everything from corporate policies and organisation charts to information on procurement, vacant positions, system processes and other corporate information. The entire site was built around an easy to use editing tool that let employees update the businesses websites quickly and easily.
Building on the site, tools such as an email signature generator, which produces consistent employee email signatures that follow a common style were also developed. Another development included a job ad generator which integrates with AGR’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 and SEM, was also an element that was included in the project, with results producing an increase in traffic by 1,500% to the site within the first three months of launch.
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 the project and the long-term benefits it will deliver to the company.
This latest addition to ongoing work with AGR has greatly improved employee participation in the online conveyance of information. The system is now being considered for a broader use within the company, with plans to roll the application for partners and other subsidiaries worldwide.
We were able to get the whole thing up and operational without too much of a hassle and had full collaboration via our website. It was a job well done, saved us an enormous amount of money and has already paid for itself many, many times. Newpath Web were fantastic to work with, competent, professional and reliable.
Ivan Prescott – IT Manager – AGR Asia Pacific
