The Shell Group uses EPMT tools to streamline worldwide business

Matthew West, manager for Reference Data Architecture and Standards at Shell International Petroleum Company Limited in London, explains: ”The data-model project is part of a much larger project to globalize Shell’s business and processes. Traditionally, we have tailored the way we do business to particular environments and countries. However, we have also experienced substantial benefits from implementing global processes, especially within the world of information technology. So, we are now globalizing our business processes to do business one way throughout the world.”

As one of the developers of the ISO 15926 data model, now being implemented as the foundation of Shell’s downstream data model, West believes, “If you are going to do things in a common way, you need a common language. That language, in our case, is made up of the reference data combined with the data model.”

The reference data includes all the static data concerning, among other things, products, materials, and production processes that sit in Shell’s databases. The data model offers a logically structured way of identifying and organizing the required data as well as specifying Shell’s information requirements for its downstream business.

The Shell Group Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemical companies. The aim of the Shell Group is to meet the energy needs of society in ways that are economically, socially and environmentally viable, now and in the future. Shell is present in 150 countries worldwide.

West explains that he and his colleagues at Shell decided to turn to Jotne EPM Technology and, in particular, use EDMvisualExpress™ because they had previous and positive experiences with the company and product. “Other important factors for choosing EDMvisualExpress™, says West, “were its relative ease of use and the good publishing options, plus the ability to have several modellers working on different but integrated schemas.”

Matthew West and his team of developers have worked on the downstream data model since June 2005 and expect to publish during the spring of 2006. “One of our strategies has been to divide the downstream data model into a number of schemas. This enables us to give different schemas to different data modelers. We have eight data modellers on the team, each of whom has one or more schemas, working in parallel. With the capabilities of EDMvisualExpress™, we are able to make references between schemas and thus perform more work concurrently.”