Conoco Drills into Hummingbird Portal

Conoco Limited, a fully integrated energy company, is involved in every aspect of the oil and natural gas industry, including worldwide exploration, production, transportation, marketing, refining and power. With ventures in more than 40 countries, Conoco has a rich history of proven technological expertise and superior project management, and is recognized worldwide for its innovative approach to deepwater exploration and production challenges and high-grade petroleum coke upgrading technology.

Conoco’s Humber Refinery, located on a 480-acre site at South Killingholme, England, is the most advanced refinery in Europe and a model of how to respond to challenging and constantly changing market conditions.

The Humber refinery initially set out in search of a document management system in an effort to upgrade a legacy system that had been installed nearly 10 years ago. The old system was not able to meet the refinery’s requirement of a single source for engineering data. In addition, the refinery sought to reduce its large number of custom databases, and so reduce the high costs involved in maintaining them. Finally, the proposed solution had to meet Conoco’s corporate strategy of moving to a thin-client environment.

Partnering for Success

Hummingbird partner CadCapture, a British system integrator with a longstanding relationship with the Humber Refinery, recommended a solution based on Hummingbird Portal. Hummingbird Portal provides Conoco with a common front-end view to a variety of applications used within Conoco and meets the objective of providing a unified interface through which users can view, search and work on documents in all repositories. Particular priority was placed on the ability to search and access SAP-related content residing in the document management system directly from the ERP application.

“It has become increasingly evident that a data management strategy is fundamental to the efficiency of our business,” said Vic Collins, EIMS project leader of Conoco Limited. “We are confident that the Hummingbird solution proposed by Cad-Capture will enable the effective control of the plant during its operational life and help us to implement strict change control procedures.”

Conoco’s Engineering Information Management System

The result of the Hummingbird Portal implementation was an Engineering Information Management System (EIMS, not to be confused with Hummingbird’s acronym EIMS—Enterprise Information Management System), which provides Conoco the ability to launch SAP from Hummingbird Portal, search SAP from within the portal and present the SAP result set within the portal screens. The solution also allows Conoco employees to seamlessly populate Hummingbird DM look up tables with data from SAP and search Hummingbird DM repositories from within SAP. Hummingbird DM is a multitier document management solution that brokers communications between Hummingbird document management clients and back-end information stores such as document repositories and SQL servers.

The new EIMS improves employee productivity by extending the scope of engineering data that is available from the ERP system beyond a simple database record. This empowers users to make more effective decisions, and reduces the time spent trying to correlate various types of unstructured content with records in the SAP system.Put simply, users do not know—or need to know—whether engineering information is coming from the document management system or SAP; they just get timely access to all relevant information through a single interface. The solution from Hummingbird was comprehensive and flexible enough to meet both a tactical mandate of upgrading an aging document management system, as well as furthering the corporate-wide initiative of moving the entire business to a thin-client environment.

Application Notes

Industry: Petrochemical

Organization: Conoco Limited

The Challenge:

• Conoco needed to replace an aging document management system that didn’t meet current requirements
• The company sought a solution that would reduce costs and human resources expended on maintaining numerous databases; and
• New corporate policy embraced a move to a thin-client environment Hummingbird Solution
• Portal, Document Management.

Key Benefits:

• Integration with SAP gives Conoco employees the ability to search and access SAP content residing in the document management system directly from the ERP application
• Timely access to all relevant information through a single interface.

About Hummingbird Portal

Hummingbird Portal enables organizations to deliver on the promise of Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) by providing a comprehensive set of features and functionality to rapidly deploy secure, web-based workspaces that provide a “360° View of Enterprise Content.”

As organizations move forward with their e-Business initiatives, it is imperative that they not only consider the integrity, scalability and openness of the solution, but also the ability to leverage existing IT infrastructure investments within the new model. Being able to seamlessly integrate mission-critical legacy applications, enterprise business packages, customer relationship management solutions, custom applications and other vital systems without extensive programming and architectural changes is of real benefit.

Hummingbird Portal is an ideal solution for organizations looking for a solid platform for building e-Business solutions while leveraging and rejuvenating existing investments in enterprise knowledge assets, business systems and applications. Hummingbird takes advantage of its experience and proven solutions for content and document management, business intelligence, host access, network connectivity, collaboration, and data integration to integrate demand-driven functionality and create a fully customizable workspace that provides users with the tools needed to access, extract, analyze, share and act on the information they need.