New times require new solutions for contractors in the oil & gas industry

IFS, the global enterprise applications company, announced today it has enhanced its offering for engineering, procure and construct (EPC) contractors by launching the EPC Toolkit, a standardized, agile tool that enables complete control of projects, regardless of their size. Most contractors are unable to achieve this with their current business software. The EPC Toolkit can easily be integrated with all types of enterprise applications.

The EPC Toolkit provides system support for all the operational processes in an EPC project, including project management, engineering, material management and job costing.

Most contractors today have either fragmented IT solutions, home-grown solutions or standard enterprise applications that lack support for operational EPC processes. At the same time, the industry is experiencing a significant change in the size of the projects they take on. Many enterprises have adapted their business applications to mega-projects, but are now faced with changing their procedures and methods to support smaller projects including asset modifications.

The oil and gas industry is also experiencing new opportunities in the form of international projects, and new operators must be agile enough to adopt new standards and methods in order to handle these global projects safely and efficiently. IFS, which has long provided IT support based on NORSOK standards, will include ISO 15926 in its portfolio of standards supported by the EPC Toolkit.

To address environmental requirements, IFS has developed Eco-footprint Management, a completely integrated tool that identifies, analyzes, and documents an enterprise’s environmental impact, the measures taken to reduce environmental impacts, and the results achieved.

“The market has given our agile engineering register a fantastic reception. In the same system, it is possible to set the status of a project across disciplines and see how changes in one discipline are registered in the others. Now that we have also included project management, document management, and support for fabrication, installation and go-live, we can offer a strong EPC Toolkit for large EPC contractors who want a new, modern enterprise solution without abandoning their legacy solutions for financials and human resource management. Parts of the solution can also be used by contractors who want to improve the way they manage major modification contracts,” IFS Director of Oil & Gas Carl-Magnus Adamsson said.

“We have invested heavily in developing a solution that is unique in terms of industry-specific, agile support for EPC projects. There have been indications from oil & gas enterprises that want to include all or part of our solution in their existing enterprise applications suite, which shows that our competitors can’t yet deliver this. It is easy to integrate the EPC Toolkit because IFS Applications is built on an open, service-oriented architecture,” Adamsson said.

IFS strategically targets suppliers to the oil & gas industry and has delivered solutions to this market for many years. IFS offers a complete, integrated industry-specific solution that manages the entire project lifecycle from engineering, project management, procurement, material management and fabrication to installation and after sales. Customers include Grenland Group, Babcock Engineering services, Heerema Fabrication Group, Dresser-Rand, Yantai Raffles, STX Norway Offshore, SeaDrill, Seawell, NCA, Hertel, Bergen Group Rosenberg, Hamworthy Gas Systems, RR Offshore, Rotary Engineering, Harland & Wolff, ShawCor and Shedden Uhde.