Marathon Oil increases productivity by 90% by streamlining SAP PM using Liquid UI

Source: Building the Business Case: Marathon Oil Success Story


Background

Marathon Oil Corporation (MOC) is a Houston based international oil corporation engaged in exploration and production of petroleum and natural gas. With over 2,300 employees, MOC produces nearly 438,000 barrels of oil per day. It has its operations based in the United States, Angola, Canada, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Libya, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom.


Challenge

  • Hard to access work orders, notifications, and equipment hierarchy details.
    • Cause: The technicians needed to navigate through multiple screens with unnecessary information to request work, view work, get equipment details and see functional location hierarchy.
    • Effect: The complex navigation with unnecessary details hindered the efficiency and the productivity of the technicians. Furthermore, it resulted in poor data quality.
  • Processing and analyzing work orders became taxing as planners and schedulers had to carry out each detail manually.
    • Cause: For planners and schedulers, interpreting and analyzing work orders was daunting as they had to review each detail manually. Also, determining job priorities or material availability was difficult.
    • Effect: Tasks like ensuring required tools, permits and materials became complicated and tricky, resulting in frequent equipment breakdowns and unplanned downtime.
  • Time-consuming and error-prone PM data collection.
    • Cause: Multiple screens, various fields, and several choices made gathering data like failure codes, system effects, detection methods, priorities, etc., tedious and susceptible to errors. Also, the data was available in incomprehensible long text format.
    • Effect: Users committed errors and required excessive training, which made the plant maintenance process slow.
  • Drop in operational efficiency due to needless data entries.
    • Cause: The present system was too intricate due to needless data entries where personnel had to memorize the tcodes, acceptable inputs based on scenarios and different catalogs.
    • Effect: Maintenance personnel struggled, dropping their performance and productivity.


Solution

"With GuiXT Liquid UI, we were able to accumulate more data to create the reports we needed to meet our reliability goals,"
- Jason Moore, Business Analyst, Marathon Oil

  • Liquid UI streamlined Marathon Oil´s day-to-day processes and provided customized role-based dashboards for SAP PM.
  • With Liquid UI, planners and schedulers can now view and analyze work orders from a single screen. Furthermore, technicians get all the required information like work orders, notifications, and equipment hierarchy details in just few clicks.
  • Liquid UI for SAP GUI simplified Marathon Oil´s whole business process starting with removing meaningless screen elements and customizing navigation and the menu bar by adding big pushbuttons to view notifications, work orders, and preventive task information.
  • Now, technicians can directly select "Eagle Ford Wells" button to see the functional location hierarchy. Furthermore, they can choose a specific functional location to get requests for work. Also, a conditional pop-up was added for determining equipment function impact.
  • Supervisors and planners can now effortlessly view, organize, and allocate work orders from an optimized role-based dashboard.
  • All the commonly used transactions are readily accessible and the work orders are organized as a matrix of buttons by priority level and work order stage, facilitating faster decision-making and preventing any backlog.
  • For the breakdown notification, long text description was replaced by radio buttons and now the technicians only need to select priority and end date. Also, in the select effect box, radio buttons were created along with a condition or malfunction field.
  • The detection method was brought to the initial screen from notification second tab, got rid of any intimidating grid structure and data entries. With the new screen, there is just one button that goes right to their catalog for the user to choose the detection method.
  • Liquid UI created customized launchpads for Scheduler/Planners for accessing day-to-day PM transactions like IH01, IH03, IW38, IW41, CM25, etc. Thus not only eliminating the need to memorize the tcodes but also providing easy access, all from the main screen.
  • The advanced dashboard features include mass printing, mass material availability checks, mass permit checks and mass changes across multiple work orders with a single click, right from the dashboard.


Results

  • Simplified SAP PM user interfaces to request work, view work, get equipment details and see functional location hierarchy.
  • Processes became effective as capturing data like failure codes, effect on the system, and detection method is streamlined.
  • User adoption increased.
  • Improved accuracy of data with one tab for notifications containing the catalog codes.
  • Optimized dashboard for different roles.

Next Steps

Liquid UI enables you to customize business processes, eliminate fields, consolidate screens, tabs, and transactions to achieve a holistic solution while preserving transaction richness. It does this without having to rebuild the whole transaction.

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