The Client
The UK Offshore Operators Association (UKOOA) is the representative organisation for the UK offshore oil and gas industry. Its members are companies licensed by the Government to explore for and produce oil and gas in UK waters.
UKOOA members include over 40 organisations such as Shell, BP, Chevron Upstream Europe and many more. However, the site is access by over 120 companies and over 2000 users.
The Need
UKOOA provide an industry forum in which issues of common interest to their members can be highlighted and addressed. As such it involves a whole host of commitees, groups and projects with cross industry membership.The only method by which these groups could discuss common issues was to arrange meetings and physically get together.
The costs of facilitation, operating and conducting these meetings was huge:
- Travel Costs (often located in Scotland, London and other locations in Norway)
- Downtime from normal job
- Accomodation Costs (often involved overnight stopover)
- Catering & Other food expenses
- Meeting Facility costs
With 8 core formal groups and over 40 informal groups arranged around different subjects and issues and between 5 and 30 members per group the costs were enormous.
UKOOA needed to facilitate collaboration in a more cost effective way.
Solution:
The implementation of QEB’s online communities solution hosted at the QEB data centre. The UKOOA Online community provides an online collaboration facility for over 2000 people from across the industry.
Features include :
- Establishing over 50 collaborative groups, including the UKOOA Board & Council, appointed committees and industry networks
- Document management with change control, version history and rollback
- Discussion forums
- Calendar for meetings with agendas, presentation and other associated documents attached
- Subscriptions - notification of new and updated content to interested parties
Benefits :
UKOOA believe that they have far exceeded their expectations and may be making vast savings per year in travel and other expenses associated with collaboration.