Performance of 15 Years of Hydraulic Fracturing of Oil Wells in South of Oman

The first application of Hydraulic Fracturing in the South Oman started in 2000 to enhance water disposal wells. In 2004 the first oil wells were frac'ed. Although the technology was deployed many times, it never grew into a conventional practice. From 2004 to 2017 on average 5 Oil Wells were hydraulically fractured on yearly basis. In November 2017, a Hydraulic Fracturing Maturation & Expansion Workshop was conducted with the vision of growing the application by applying new frac concepts. A focused effort was initiated to drastically reduce cost, and simultaneously increase the scope by executing larger frac campaigns. The first hydraulic fracturing campaign introducing the frac new concepts, started end 2018 and a rapid growth from 5 wells per year to 45 wells per year was anticipated in the next three years. This large growth of scope relied on a steady supply of frac candidates and needed to be supported by screening and selecting processes that are fit for purpose in finding candidates. Although more than a hundred wells had already been frac'ed wells, selection of the most appropriate wells for stimulation was and remains one of the greatest challenges. A frac performance database was created for over 100 wells that had been hydraulically fracture stimulated to date. Recognizing that the frac performance depends on many variables ranging from subsurface properties to surface execution of the frac job, the size of the dataset proved to be too small to find correlations using sophisticated multivariable regression methods. Instead, the dataset was analyzed through careful investigation and evaluation of each frac job. In this paper the net oil gain will be used as the key success criteria i.e., value driver to demonstrates how effective the frac is achieving its business objective. Some 40% of the producers had been producing from the same zone before the hydraulic fracture stimulation. This provided the opportunity to understand the efficiency of the stimulation in terms of the "stimulation ratio" i.e., measuring the net oil gain. This paper will focus on investigating the suitability of frac'ing the reservoir based on the initial production variables; Gross Rate and BS&W. Also, this paper will discuss benefits and impacts of Hoist versus Coiled-Tubing clean-out on the frac delivery process and compare the frac performance. To date, the project demonstrated that hydraulic fracturing at low cost, can be applied as a viable development concept for producing oil wells, with the potential unlock additional and new reserves. Significant folds in production increase are possible from 2x to 7x.

Improving Building Energy Footprint and Asset Performance Using Digital Twin Technology

This article presents a novel architecture by integrating the existing asset management theory with building simulation technology for effective maintenance strategies and operational control schemes. Building performance, value and energy usage collectively define the criteria for optimization. Building assets are partially or fully connected with building Internet of Things (IoT) and their real time conditions are accessible at all times. An asset’s value is derived from the functional contributions of that asset to the overall business objective of the system that it is part of. The architecture consists of digital twin, analytics and Business Value Model (BVM) engines and in-between gateways for data exchange. The paper provides illustrative examples for how the platform can serve operations and maintenance (O&M) objectives of existing and new buildings.

Change Management: A Game Changer for Effective Digital Transformation

Change Management is a process of adopting appropriate guidelines on how to manage change and meet the set business objective. Change Management could be extended into the realm of providing leadership for a group of persons or organisation alongside the path of change and embed the needed framework in actualising the set business target. Conversely, Digital Transformation could be described as the deployment of technology in a business process to amplify business benefits realisation that include fast decision-making, efficient business processes and significant reduction in risk exposure through managing the operational risk foot print. Failures of many Digital Transformation initiatives around the world is traceable to poor framing or complete lack of change management process embedment in the implemented digital solution, this paper aims at proposing effective framework for embedding orchestrated change process. Several research works show that worldwide there are high rate of project failures in most digital oilfield implementations. The reasons for such high failure rate in the solution of Digital Transformation is poor or lack of experience in change management in such projects resulting in poor framing of the change process that will ultimately assist in orchestrating the disruptions that accompanies the implemented Digital Transformation in different assets. This research based project will be reviewing how effective change management process was implemented in a digital solution by an Oil and gas operator in a field offshore in sub-Saharan Africa. Elements such as proper engagement of the workforce, defined business processes, clear business objectives and experience of the change agents in managing previous projects will be evaluated because these are components that has been identified as key reasons for failure of the change management process implementation in most digital initiatives. What companies need to do is to be strategic with the approach of implementation of digital oilfields transformation to ensure that the disruption brought about by the digital oilfields solutions are orchestrated through effective change management embedment. The effective change management process, when applied, shows that orchestrated technology disruption process is embedded which will ultimately not just lead to benefit realisation of the solutions but will assure continuous business improvement process, overtime. The result of this study, has shown that effective change management processes are beneficial to the effective embedment of Digital Oilfields Transformation solutions. Outcome of this study could form a reference tool for similar robust digital oilfields transformation, elsewhere.

Strategic Communications and the Toms Case: Aligning Business Strategy With Strategic Communication

This work analyses the principles of strategic communication, taking the case of the Toms firm as an example in which business strategy aligns with strategic communication. It explains this company’s management style on how strategic communication is to be understood. Fundamentally, the Toms strategy focuses more on exploiting its potential to fulfil its mission in the long term (to sell and be an organisation standing for solidarity) than on applying resources or making partial, short-term communication decisions. Thus, the entire business model and all long-term business decisions can in themselves be regarded as strategic communication decisions since the business objective becomes a communication objective. In this way, each tactic and action put into play in the firm’s evolution provides it with social value and confers a constantly changing communicative dimension, which is only possible in nonlinear organisations whose business design is hypertextual or bidirectional.

Development of an Enterprise Architecture for Healthcare using TOGAF ADM

Hospital is one of the most complex organization with highly intensive interaction between stakeholders (patients, nurses, doctors, staff, etc.). In the operation of a hospital, the use of Information technology has been proven to improve effectiveness and efficiency. However, in the majority of cases, the processes to achieve the Strategic Objectives through implementation of Information Technology are full of challenges. Based on the case study in Dharmais Cancer Hospital, there are many symptoms that are identified by this study and lead to 4 issues, namely: lack of ownership from Business users, lack of alignment between business strategy and IT strategy, lack of awareness to use IT as a tool for competitive advantage, and low quality of IT operation performances. In order to solve the issues and support the achievement of Strategic Business Objective through IT, an Enterprise Architecture approach can be used to develop baseline architecture, identify the target architecture, finding the gap, and use the gap as recommendation to solve those issues. The methodology chosen is TOGAF ADM, based on its focus on processes and its flexibility to combine artifacts and approaches that are most suitable for the case. This study develops 7 recommendations to Strengthen Business area of organization, 5 recommendations to Align IT plan with Business Strategy, 16 recommendations to Implement several IT solutions as Competitive Advantage for organization, and 8 recommendations to provide higher performances by enabling Service Management approach for IT Operation. This study also shows how TOGAF ADM can improve the awareness of the business users to the business itself. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2021-01278 Full Text: PDF

Business Excellence through the Theory of Accountability

Background/Purpose: Theory of Accountability or Theory A is argued to be the best tool for enhancing organizational performance in the 21st century due to the relevance of its motivational and controlling factors with changing competitive environment of organizational business. Objective: To find the suitability and possibility of using the Theory of Accountability to improve organizational business excellence and to know its validity and superiority over other business excellence theories. Design/Methodology/Approach: Analysis of information collected from various scholarly articles and by using ABCD analysis framework. Findings/Result: Based on the analysis, it is found that the Theory of Accountability plays a founding stage to assured development of an organization by means of optimum performance through enhanced productivity and highest stakeholders performance leading to achieve business excellence. Research limitations/implications: The analysis of using Theory of Accountability principles in organizational development in the 21st century complements the objective of organizations to achieve business excellence. Originality/Value: This paper fulfills a global need on how to achieve business excellence by implementing organizational human accountability. Paper Type: Explorative research based analysis.

Relevance of human resource management on small business objective in digital era: A critical review of research evidence

One of the essential elements in advancing small and medium enterprises is the availability of Human Resources management. So HR development must be relevant to the needs of small businesses, especially now that small businesses are present in the digital era. So to see the suitability of HR development with the needs of small businesses in achieving their core goals. So we have reviewed dozens of papers on our efforts to find this relevance through reviewing the papers we search electronically on Google scholar-based data. We specialize in papers published between 2010 and 2021, so we can get the latest data. To get answers to this research question, we analyzed the data using a phenomenological approach. We also involve the coding, interpretation, and evaluation system to find accurate, valid, and reliable data findings. So the results include that there is a close relationship between the SDm system and the central ideals of SMEs. Logically, if the human resources are good, the company and the smallest business will quickly improve and efficiently achieve the final goal.

IMPLEMENTING IT GOVERNANCE TO LEVERAGE IS/IT VALUE IN AN ORGANIZATION CASE STUDY MIS DEPARTMENT OF PT. XYZ

The objective In this research are to know what are the indicator of good performance, what are the CSF, KPI & KGI for ?, how do we measure and compare both of them? The Methodology used for this research is based on framework released by IT Governance Institute but it is being modified (minor changes) for a certain purpose. Based on our analysis the average IT Maturity level of fourteen IT process at MIS Department PT. XYZ is 2.83 more higher than the result from ISACA survey among 47 US company only 2.62. The IT management of PT. XYZ should not make their self satisfied with this result, as multinational company they have to aware for improving regarding their IT governance. Our research also provided & equipped set action plan & methodology for management to achieve the better IT Maturity Level. There are some recommendations for the IT management in order to achieve the better namely: 1. IT Maturity Level Management have to perform continuous improvement, especially for some IT process such as DS1 (Define Service Level) the lowest maturity rating, DS4 (Ensure Continuous Services) the second lowest maturity rating, PO9 (Assess Risk) & PO10 (Manage Project) the third lowest maturity rating. 2. Management also have to consider for doing the full step methodology in the next assessment. 3. Management have to consider for develop performance measurement tools, this tools will help management to manage IT resources & process for aligning with the business objective

Model-driven support for business process families with the Common Variability Language (CVL)

To achieve a business objective, organizations may require variants of the same business process that depend on the context in which they are enacted. Several proposals have emerged to deal with the variability of business processes, focused on the modeling of a so-called process family. The proposals try to avoid modeling each variant separately, which implies duplication and maintenance of the common parts. Few of them also focus on automatically deriving a process variant from the definition of a process family, which is a central and complex task. One of these proposals is the Common Variability Language (CVL), which allows representing variability transparently in a host language. This article aims to explore the use of CVL together with the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN 2.0) for modeling business process families, and the use of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques for the automatic generation of process variants. We also present a graphical tool supporting these ideas and a qualitative evaluation of the variability approach by using the VIVACE framework.

A Machine Learning Web Application to Estimate Listing Prices of South African Homes

Due to the heterogeneous nature of residential properties, determining selling prices which will reconcile supply and demand is difficult. Establishing realistic listing prices is vitally important for sellers to prevent prolonged time on market. Sellers have several resources available to assist in this endeavour, all of which involve understanding current market dynamics through analysing recent sales and listing data. Property portals which aggregate real estate agencies’ data, hosting it on online platforms, are one such resource, along with individual real estate agencies. Leveraging this data to develop solutions that could aid sellers in listing price decision making is a potential business objective that could not only add value to sellers but create a competitive advantage by increasing traffic to an online real estate platform. Using data provided by a South African online property portal, this paper creates a web application using machine learning to estimate listing prices for different types of homes throughout South Africa. This study compared log linear and gradient boosted models, estimating residential listing prices over a four-year period. The results indicate that although log linear models are suitable to account for spatial dependency in the data through the inclusion of a fixed location effect, the assumption of linear functional form was not satisfied. The gradient boosted models do not impose explicit functional form requirements, making them flexible candidates. Similarly, these models were able to handle the spatial dependency adequately. The gradient boosted models also achieved a lower out of sample error compared to the log linear models. The findings show that over observation periodperiod, larger properties consistently experience a diminishing return at some point over the marginal distribution of physical characteristics. The web application details how sellers are easily able to obtain mean listing price estimates and gauge the growth thereof, by simply inputting their property interest criteria.