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Success Story: Project Objects manages multi-billion-dollar portfolio for ENI’s exploration projects

Integrated energy companies like ENI conduct oil and gas exploration activities through long term, multi-billion-dollar capital projects involving large numbers of contractors and stakeholders worldwide.

In recent years, ENI has encountered increasing challenges, just like many other oil and gas operators. This is in part due to changing market conditions, plus the global crash in oil prices. Typical business challenges include: a reluctance for partners to assume the risk for managing large capital projects; a need to identify and quantify more project risks in advance; a desire to increase project performance against a backdrop of unstable political and environmental conditions in many of the countries where energy companies are active; plus, a tendency for some project owners to lack the project and programme management skills required to run such complex projects. 

Desire to improve stakeholder collaboration

To counter the impact of these issues, ENI wanted to identify a single, enterprise level project management technology solution that would enable the Company to achieve the following goals:

• Collaborate more closely with internal and external stakeholders on highly complex projects 
• Standardise oil and gas contracts management to improve document and cost management, plus avoid unanticipated increases;
• Introduce custom workflows for different aspects of project management to enable greater flexibility whilst still maintaining tight controls;
• Run a more efficient programme management function by maintaining visibility, monitoring and control on a higher number of projects;
• Accurately balance capital and development expenditure with production and reserves, using an integrated cost management system
• Greater visibility of situations where costs have changed, due to unclear requirements at the outset. 
• The Company’s latest exploration of giant fields demonstrates a good example of new developments requiring a complex combination of offshore and onshore activities that required an investment in an advanced project management methodology and tools to be more successful.
• After a review of the marketplace, ENI selected ProjectObjects as its Project Management and Collaboration tool, because it has a modular architecture and is designed for managing large scale capital projects in rapidly changing environments.  

A key factor in making this decision was ProjectObject’s flexibility, ease of use and overall fit for the oil and gas industry.

Implementation and change programme

To implement ProjectObjects, ENI worked closely with a large international System Integrator and the Project Objects consulting team, providing the strong project management capabilities needed to facilitate an internal change management process across thousands of users.   

“Project Objects supported ENI and its System Integration partner during the implementation phase by finding value in business analysis and modelling, driving the client in the design of a solution fitting ‘ENI’s way’ and meeting business needs whilst minimising change impacts on internal resources,” says Gioacchino Gaudioso, CEO of Project Objects.

Real time management of multi-billion-dollar projects

Since implementing ProjectObjects, ENI now uses the solution to manage multi-billion-dollar projects involving 30,000 activities, with well over 5,000 active internal and external users. The original software roll out began in Kazakhstan for local projects underway in the region. It is now being implemented in Norway and Mozambique as part of an ongoing roll out programme due to reach completion in Q2 2019.

A real-time, integrated model of project and portfolio management was achieved both in terms of process and system support. Integrated document management has helped to minimise time spent on data entry and guarantees the integrity and consistency of all capital projects data for ongoing performance and variance analysis. 

ProjectObjects has been integrated with multiple software applications and in addition, integration with ENI’s main SAP ERP system supports improved cost control through the availability of work breakdown structures, budgets and contracts. An intuitive dashboard ensures top and middle layer management have up to date project data in terms of costs and scheduling at all times.  

Since implementing ProjectObjects, ENI has reported significantly improved data and information flows among departments and functional areas which are aimed at improving data sharing and communication, driving people towards greater awareness of the impact of their own work on others and vice versa. Monthly reports can be shared between the team members and other stakeholders, providing updates on cost and project control progress.

Improved response times, data integration and traceability

Another key advantage has been the ability to open the company’s EPM (enterprise project management) business platform to suppliers, in particular for technical queries and variation order processes, through a dedicated approval workflow and e-mail notification. This improves both response times and project data integration and traceability. It has also significantly improved transparency and relationships between external contractors, who can now access project data and see both technical aspects of the project plus contract values. Contractors have the ability to raise technical queries through a formal RFI process and can also submit invoices through ProjectObjects, reducing project administration.

ENI commented that “Project Objects has supported ENI to develop a new Project and Portfolio Management tool to improve the ownership and control of global capital projects being managed by local subsidiaries and joint ventures. The new solution covers all the typical project controls – costs, time, resource utilisation, risks, action plans and change requests. In addition, it provides a collaborative environment to support improved communication with contractors, one of the greatest challenges in capital projects execution.”

As the ENI group expands, ProjectObjects continues to be the company standard PPM solution and is being implemented in new divisions and geographies on an ongoing basis.