Production Planning for most oil and gas production facilities involves the cooperation of a number of different areas of the company. Engineering staff provide forecasts of equipment availability and processing capacity.  Reservoir Engineering staff create forecasts of field performance typically for gas, propane, butane, condensate and also water.  Operations staff provide input on factors that affect recent platform performance, including weather conditions. Marketing staff predict product inventories and tanker cargo and may also manage gas nominations. The Production Planning System facilitates the orderly flow of work for these different organisational areas and functions using configurable workflow.

Functions of the Production Planning system include :

• Provides, daily, weekly, monthly and annual forecasts.
• Allows Operations Engineering to create and update the capacity plan.
• Allows Reservoir Engineering to manage the production forecast by each field.
• Operations can review the forecast and factor in unscheduled outages.
• Liquids Marketing use the collated information to revise the cargo plan.
• Gas Marketing also use the information to revise gas nominations.
• Links into product simulation and reservoir forecasting systems (Optional).

The Production Planning system provides a consolidated repository of all the information that is used in the production planning process and avoids the common problem of “islands of automation” arising from the use of multiple spreadsheets and databases. The system provides an integrated approach to managing the flow of information and the changes that frequently occur during the production planning process. Production Planning is entirely web-based and can be easily accessed both offshore and onshore, based on the in-built security model and permissions assigned to users.

The Production Planning System facilitates the efficient and timely handling of production planning information resulting in benefits including: