8 January 2009

CAMS is a scheduling engine that drives and coordinates maintenance for oil and gas extraction and production

Program Framework has launched a scheduling engine that reduces cost, time and safety risks by driving and coordinating maintenance for oil and gas extraction and production.

The enterprise project management consultancy, which has recently been made a Microsoft Gold Partner, developed the intelligent Capital Asset Maintenance Streamliner (CAMS) to bring together industry processes such as scheduling, and tracking and reporting on complex maintenance of large equipment and plants.

“We understand that optimising maintenance programmes is crucial for the 24/7 operations of the dynamic oil and gas industry, where the cost of lost time through shutdowns is massive,” said Paul Major, managing director of Program Framework.

CAMS does much more than focus purely on lists of what needs to be done and when

Paul Major, Program Framework “CAMS does much more than focus purely on lists of what needs to be done and when. It shows what resources are needed – both in manpower and equipment – any critical safety related issues and where a specific task fits with other planned and reactive maintenance activities.

“For example, if scheduled maintenance on a particular piece of plant calls for isolating the electrical supply to that area, it invariably means other systems have to be shut down, too. But if you can see which of those systems are also due for overhaul or maintenance, it makes sense to carry that out at the same time.”

Built on Microsoft technology and familiar planning tools such as Microsoft Project, together with browser-based Web interfaces, CAMS is designed to be easy to adopt and requires just a short training session to use. It can be applied to other industries where maintenance of large-scale capital assets is involved, such as power generation and chemical processing, and is already being successfully used on several North Sea platforms.

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