OKEA achieves profitability and growth by outsourcing IT to Cegal

Written by Editorial staff | Jan 17, 2023 11:04:39 AM

OKEA lets Cegal manage and operate the oil and gas company's IT platform. It has greatly contributed to OKEA's cost-effective operation of IT and access to modern technology. Some reasons for OKEA's success in a tough, competitive oil and gas industry are simplifying the IT platform, halving the number of applications and major time savings.

OKEA was founded in 2015, and the company's strategy is to be the leading mid-to late-life operator on the Norwegian continental shelf (NCS). Today, OKEA is the operator of the Draugen and Brage fields,and holds partnerships in the production licenses on the Nova, Gjøa, Ivar Aasen and Yme fields. In addition, the company is a partner in 19 licenses in the exploration and planning phase.

With strict cost control and by exploiting the possibilities of modern technology with help from Cegal, we ensure our profitability.

Dag Eggan, Senior Vice President Special Projects i OKEA

Cegal chosen because of business understanding and technology knowledge

OKEA chose Cegal as an IT partner because of Cegal's solid business understanding, deep industrial and geoscience knowledge combined with expertise in cloud platforms, self-developed industrial software, and consulting services.

Eskild Wold, Team Lead Agile IT in Cegal, says: “The special thing about our role at OKEA is that Cegal has in-depth knowledge of the energy industry that we are for all practical purposes OKEA's IT department. In addition, we facilitate for OKEA quickly to make good, overall decisions in the span between IT and business.”

The first test of whether OKEA's business idea would flow, and if Cegal was the best technology partner, came with the takeover of operatorship on the Draugen field. OKEA assumed operator responsibility from Shell Norge on the first of December 2018. At the same time, all IT operations were transferred to Cegal. Similarly, OKEA assumed the operatorship for the Brage field from Wintershall Deaas planned on the 1 November 2022.

Both takeovers meant that necessary business data, several hundred terabytes, had to be transferred to OKEA. With help from Cegal, information and data were transferred to new applications with the following results:

Radical simplification of the IT platform compared to the IT platform that was in production before the takeover.
The number of applications was halved from several hundred to between 100 and 200.
Transfer time of less than six months, far shorter than similar transfers.

Cegal's work continues in the operational phase of the fields, and the IT platform is part of Cegal's Business Improvement Service. With this service, OKEA and Cegal work together to continuously streamline and improve operations at the intersection of geoscience, technology and business.

Cegal operates as OKEA's IT department

Cegal has been OKEA's technology partner through the transformation from a smaller exploration company to an operator through the production takeover of Draugen from Shell in 2018 and further in 2022 with the takeover of Brage from Wintershall Dea. Among other things, Cegal has provided industrial software, operations, and cloud services. In practice, Cegal functions as OKEA's IT department.

Dag Eggan in OKEA explains: “We have a basic strategy that we should not build specialist expertise internally in areas outside our core business.”

The daily IT operations are managed by key resources in Cegal, who regularly report to OKEA's only IT employee, Aksel Giset. This also includes security, budget, and control.

The partnership with Cegal has been such a great success that other companies come to us to hear about how we handle IT and Information Management.

Dag Eggan, Senior Vice President Special Projects i OKEA.

OKEA's strategy, and the services Cegal delivers, mean that Norway, the owners, and the environment benefit to the maximum from previous investments in developed fields. This is because the service life is extended instead of new fields being developed.

"Cegal delivers scalable services, which OKEA can scale up and down as needed to adjust cost ccording to the changes in oil price. With Cegal's delivery, OKEA has converted capital expenditures (CapEx) to operating costs (OpEx) to support the strategic goal of cost-effective operations," says Eskild Wold, Team Lead Agile IT at Cegal.

Cegal's cloud platform, Cetegra, with prepared application packages for industrial applications, is an essential factor in ensuring fast, profitable takeovers and profit realization.

With Cegal's delivery, OKEA has converted CapEx to OpEx, in order to support the strategic goal of cost-effective operation.

Eskild Wold, Cegal