Making Our Day Simpler
A small team of four in Bergen has driven change for the company
Maybe you’ll get inspired, too
Find out what they’ve done
Continuous Improvement
That’s what some think about making changes to their SAP system, no matter the industry, no matter the company — including TechnipFMC in recent years.
Perhaps because one wrong move in the software can have
far-reaching implications across an organization.
Enter our Bergen team.
At the beginning of 2020, just before we'd heard about corona, COVID-19 or home office, Sverre Undeland and Jon Halsne started the Business Transformation department at Subsea Services Norway and UK. Supporting continuous improvement with the business line itself driving the change is their mandate. Three SAP projects were earmarked as being complex enough to warrant close attention.
The good news is that they were spearheaded by two hands-on players, both with direct experience from the involved business area. One is even a big fan of SAP.
There are lots of apps developed for specific situations but it’s better to create solutions in our core system that don’t just solve things then and there,
says Senior Process Expert Petter Brandal, who headed the two
logistics improvements.
A hassle."
"Too complex to easily change.
Written by Jennifer Varino
“I’ve worked with SAP systems since 1996, and it’s amazingly big and well put together — everything is linked in one system and it works"
Petter Brandal
Senior Process Expert
Employee engagement enabled the change
At Subsea Services, we receive, mobilize and return a large variety of valuable equipment for our work offshore, and each piece’s location must be tracked in our workshops at all times. Brandal recognized that the process around this was cumbersome.
As the creator of an earlier SAP solution for our workshops (the ZIQ09), he had the idea that it could be further adapted to simplify the situation and be much more effective. He wanted to add the functionality to plan logistics movements and internal transportation at a specific future date.
But he needed a programmer.
Together with Business Transformation, he reached out to the global TechnipFMC IT department in Houston. The process accelerated when IT approved the use of an external programmer in Norway who was conveniently part of the ZIQ09’s original team.
With local funding secured, they got to work in November 2020, with Brandal designing the expanded solution, now aptly named Equipment Wizard.
Workshop and project coordinators, warehouse personnel — basically anyone who handles customer equipment — and, of course, our customer are all beneficiaries. The movement of equipment can now be scheduled in advance.
What logistics improvements did we need?
"No more sending
e-mails and cleaning up in SAP afterwards"
"
"
Petter Brandal
The second logistics improvement was for the more efficient registration and tracking of items. As part of this, equipment can now be registered in batches, compared to the time-intensive process of one at a time. Think of the person who was putting 250 pieces of equipment to go offshore into the system and now has one click to make. It’s not surprising that feedback during testing was, “Amazing, when can I use it?”
These logistics improvements started off as a purely local initiative, but while in dialogue with the global IT team, it was discovered that they would work as a global solution. They are now available for all of TechnipFMC.
With that large volume of potential global use in mind, Brandal stress tested the logistics improvement changes by doing a transfer request for 7,000 pieces of equipment at one time.
Using the old methods, this would have taken months to do and it not only worked but took about a minute of his time.
Doing a lot at a time with less effort
Equinor lets us inside
Now, let’s look at the third improvement. This time we get inside not just ours but also customer Equinor’s own SAP system.
At the helm of this change was Ann-Magritt Carlsen, the IT and Digital Services Business Relationship Partner with the job of fulfilling Equinor’s request to automate our maintenance documentation. “We were manually entering the documentation into our system and then having to repeat it in their system as per our frame agreement requirements,” she explains.
“It made a lot of sense to have a more efficient and effective solution than copy-paste.”
- Ann-Magritt Carlsen
Carlsen linked up with Business Transformation in Bergen and connected with our global team for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) — SAP is an ERP system.
She found that her knowledge from years of experience from the local business side of the challenge was helpful when developing the solution.
“It made a lot of sense to have a more efficient and effective solution than copy-paste”
Ann-Magritt Carlsen
Ann-Magritt Carlsen
“What we ended up with is very simple but we didn’t see that originally,” she says. “We started off talking about robots and ended up with an e-mail solution. It's based on an automated background job in SAP that runs during the night — there was no need to be big and complicated.”
She explains, "We matched Equinor's exact requirements for receiving information so that the documentation is automatically created. Results then return to TechnipFMC in a simple e-mail."
A TechnipFMC programmer in Kongsberg was asked to step in to set it up. Being on the same time zone with him and speaking the same language further eased the process.
Roll-out took place during March. Each of our many workshops will supply the maintenance information and document control personnel will do the entry.
She points out that maintenance documentation may seem small but that it’s an important part of what we do. For example, if operations failed, the documentation is needed to make it clear that maintenance isn’t the problem and focus goes elsewhere.
In addition to calculations that estimate more than 900 hours will be saved annually in Norway thanks to this SAP improvement, the change opens up for more proactive use of the data.
Experimenting on the job
This local solution for Equinor may even have global application. Carlsen says that will be explored.
Regardless of the outcome with that, all three projects are an example of successful global collaboration between IT and the business. Business Transformation’s Project Manager Jon Halsne explains. “IT headquarters in Houston did a great job facilitating for us in different ways for each project so that we could get them off the ground and ensure they work in the real world. It could be easy to not realize that a tiny SAP tweak that helps you might also create a major problem in another country’s office.”
Mixing this support with local knowledge and decision making allowed the team to hit the sweet spot for all three projects.
The sweet spot between global and local
“People work better when unsatisfying tasks like repetitive manual entry are removed from their day.
Plus, the potential for typing errors is removed!”
Jon Halsne
Project Manager Business Transformation
Hard benefits also matter, with the increased resulting capacity from these changes being quantifiable and ever more relevant in a challenging market.
Global
Local
Sweet
spot
Business Transformation, lead by Sverre Undeland, is today shepherding around 15 projects, big and small, including the SAP improvements we’ve presented. These three were carefully tested and are now live. Their benefits are easy to like, such as doing something with one click that used
to take many, many clicks.
Change the way you work
“This is a good story about how we are improving our execution by being proactive about things that impact our working environment”
Sverre Undeland
Manager Business Transformation
Take some time today to make a virtual toast of celebration to our SAP improvement changes team for a job well done!
What would you improve in your own workday?
© TechnipFMC plc
