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8750316 
Meetings & Symposia 
A constraint management based planning approach to delivering exploration, development and production work programmes 
Macdougall, I; Saman, K 
2006 
Society of Petroleum Engineers 
2 
691-697 
English 
Stuart Petroleum is an emerging independent oil and gas company, operating an exploration, development and production work programme in the Cooper Basin in central Australia. The company's philosophy is to operate as a virtual organization, outsourcing many aspects of its programme in order to leverage the capability of local and international service and technology providers to gain competitive advantage. With an approach such as this, driven by a very small central leadership team, an effective planning capability underpinning effective execution becomes a critical core competency. Even in a small company such as Stuart, the exploration, development and production programme contains in excess of 5000 key items in any one year, including both office and field activities. Stuart Petroleum uses a state of the art MP-ReMS™ (Multi-Project Resource Management System) planning platform, which dynamically models the oil and gas exploration development programme across the enterprise, based on key corporate objectives. This capability has yielded significant benefit in optimising resource and materials utilisation and has facilitated substantial cost reductions. Stuart Petroleum has successfully linked its planning strategies directly to its corporate objectives hence connecting the work programme directly to the outcomes achieved for its shareholders. The planning platform models the deployment of critical resources and also tracks milestones in the undertaking of each event, underscoring the priorities of the business. A Constraint Management approach is employed to accelerate drilling and production hookup of a ranked seriatum of oil and gas prospects with minimal resource and material wastage. This approach offers far greater flexibility compared to traditional time based scheduling methods such as critical path analysis. The system developed incorporates a "what if" Scenario Analysis capability that allows the leadership team to explore strategic options and their impact on the "current best plan" and corporate objectives. This paper illustrates the approach taken, highlighting some of the challenges faced and outcomes achieved when managing a large number of concurrent activities competing for finite resources, through effective application of a constraint management approach. Copyright 2006, Society of Petroleum Engineers.