Afren Hires Aconex to Manage Oil Projects in Nigeria

Aconex, provider of online project collaboration solutions for the oil and gas industry, today announced its engagement by Afren plc, a leading independent oil and gas exploration and production company. Afren uses the Aconex Online Collaboration Platform to manage the operation and maintenance of its Ebok and Okoro Setu oil field platforms off the coast of Nigeria.

“We have individuals from several organizations working on the Ebok and Okoro Setu projects, and it’s critical that everyone be aligned at all times,” said Dhiraj Kavia, technical applications manager at Afren. “The Aconex platform enables us to structure and control all project data as it flows among team members, resulting in improved efficiency, governance and compliance. The system is easy to learn and use, and we have the support of a global organization when we need it.”

The teams responsible for operating and maintaining the production platforms in the Ebok and Okoro Setu fields span Nigeria, the U.K. and the U.S. They use the Aconex platform to capture all project data in one place for centralized information management and retrieval. In a secure, cloud-based collaboration environment, participants across different locations have anytime, anywhere access to the current version of all project documents and drawings, as well as a complete audit trail of all decisions and actions.

According to Dhiraj Kavia, previous collaboration tools had limited Afren’s ability to provide access to project participants outside of Afren. With the Aconex multiparty collaboration platform, all team members have access to the project data they need, when they need it. Also, Aconex meets Afren’s requirement for the integration of document and correspondence management capabilities in a single system.

“The oil and gas market in Africa and other regions has shown increasing demand for our collaborative project information management solutions,” said Hervé Hamelin, Aconex general manager of Europe, Middle East and Africa. “Some of these solutions are being deployed for construction-related projects, like the Afren production platforms, while others are being used for interface management to identify and resolve interfaces between vendors on mega-projects. We look forward to strengthening our position as a major supplier to this market.”