Specialist Offshore Services Company achieves Cloud

Case study: Swire Oilfield Services
Specialist Offshore Services Company
achieves Cloud Collaboration Vision thanks to
Silversands, SharePoint 2013 and Office 365
Swire Oilfield Services is the world’s largest supplier of specialist offshore cargo carrying
units to the global energy industry and a leading supplier of offshore cargo carrying
solutions, modular systems, offshore aviation services and fluid management. It has
operations in over 31 countries, and a team of 1000 staff working from 50 bases around the
world.
“Firstly, we needed to be
able to rapidly and
effectively share
information across our
organisation. Secondly,
we wanted the ability to
replace the outdated
file-share environment
with something that would
allow our teams across
the globe to upload, share,
store and collaborate on
documents with ease.”
Ashleigh Martin
Group Commercial Support Manager
Swire Oilfield Services
When Kev Cooper became CIO of Swire Oilfield
Services, he had a vision to take the organisation from
one of disparate applications, hard-to-find information
and file-shares, to one where the technology
infrastructure would be useful to everyone, visually
pleasing and cost effective to run – a bit like the
clocks that feature in every Swire Oilfield Services
office world-wide.
With Kev’s direction, the five-strong development
team: Tara Zacha, Group Programme and
Applications Manager; Brian Lockens, Group IT
Project Manager; Ashleigh Martin, Group Commercial
Support Manager; Andrew Currie, Group
Infrastructure and Service Delivery Manager; and
Jasper Buendia, Group IT Support Engineer, set to
work to start to bring Kev’s vision to life.
“The clocks were something we discussed a lot
amongst the project team because no matter which
one of the Swire Oilfield Services sites you were
visiting, there was a consistent visual cue that
connected you to the company values and our global
reach. I wanted our technology platform to have the
same impact.”
“There were two components to the project”, says
Ashleigh Martin. “Firstly we needed to be able to
rapidly and effectively share information across our
organisation. We have a number of different business
units and we wanted to ensure that everybody
understood the range of services that we provide,
regardless of location or function. Secondly, we
wanted the ability to replace the outdated file-share
environment with something that would allow our
teams across the globe to upload, share, store and
collaborate on documents with ease. We wanted
SwireNet to be a platform that people naturally
gravitated towards, or as Kev called it the ‘glue that
brings the organisation together’.”
It wasn’t a straight forward process however, Kev
knew this would be a multi-year project and so put a
strategic plan in place that would gradually replace
the existing productivity tools with more intuitive, and
cost effective, Microsoft offerings. Implementing
Exchange and Lync in Office 365 were the first steps
in that process, but the overall vision couldn’t be
achieved without a collaborative platform. Having
spent a lot of time examining the Microsoft roadmap,
Kev and his team decided on SharePoint 2013
deployed on Office 365 as the platform to bring their
vision for a company-wide intranet to life; releasing an
RFP for ‘SwireNet’ in August 2013.
After providing a successful response to the initial
RFP, Silversands were invited to Aberdeen to present
the solution they thought would bring ‘SwireNet’ to life.
“This was a really exciting opportunity for us”, explains
Gavin Hale, Silversands Project Manager“, we loved
Call 01202 360 000 or visit www.silversands.co.uk for more information
Case study: Swire Oilfield Services
the idea of being able to take Swire Oilfield Services
from an old fashioned file-share environment to a
multi-tenanted Office 365 cloud solution.” Gavin’s
excitement for the project was matched by that of Neil
Wells-West, the Silversands SharePoint Solution
Architect who was appointed to lead the design.
“There is so much that you can do with SharePoint
2013, but sometimes just talking about it doesn’t really
convey the power of what is possible. I knew that Kev
and his team would gain a great deal more by seeing
the product in action, and so decided to provision a
demo environment to really showcase how we thought
Sharepoint on Office 365 could help Kev realise his
vision.”
“SwireNet was always
designed to be the building
blocks of how the Swire
Oilfield Services teams
work together. From small
things like reducing the
amount of emails that
contain attachments, to
helping us deliver a range
of workflow tools and apps
that really will change the
way that we do business.”
Kev Cooper
CIO
Swire Oilfield Services
“It’s been a great
experience working with
Silversands, they have a
wonderful attitude to work
and their ability to flex and
change as the vision
evolved made them an
outstanding partner to
work with.”
Ashleigh Martin
Group Commercial Support Manager
Swire Oilfield Services
What Neil was able to do on that day was give the
Swire Oilfield Services team not only a real-time view
of what the solution would look like and its
capabilities, but also the opportunity to enjoy the
experience of Sharepoint and Office 365 together on
a range of hardware: PC, tablet and mobile.
“We created user accounts for Kev and his team and
asked them to log in via their mobile devices,” said
Gavin, “we knew the ability for the Swire senior
management team and field-based executives to be
able to view information easily was important, and we
knew that the UI had to be attractive. Demonstrating
this in a hands-on way was the best way to prove we
had listened to the brief.”
The approach was something that the Swire Oilfield
Services team really appreciated. “It made
Silversands stand out,” said Brian Lockens, IT Group
Project Manager, “their attention to detail and demo
environment gave us confidence that Silversands had
understood our vision and would be able to translate
that into a fully functioning solution.”
The next challenge came with the amount of legacy
data that Swire Oilfield Services held. With a
requirement to be able to access and work with the
data on a daily basis, and the business operating
24/7, it had to be seamless. Based on Silversands’
experience in using Metavis, the Swire team felt
reassured that the migration would be low-risk and
well managed.
That’s not to say the project was simple. “Moving
on-site, file-share data to a multi-tenancy Office 365
environment is complex and requires a deep
understanding of traditional, cloud, and hybrid
infrastructures; it’s why there aren’t many partners
who can do what we do”, said Gavin. “That’s why we
brought members of our development team into the
design and analysis workshops. It’s an unusual step,
but we wanted to make sure that every possible data
permutation and potential challenge was accounted
for so we could deliver in accordance with Kev and
Brian’s timeframes.”
“One of the most impressive things about Silversands”
continues Brian, “was that Gavin involved the
development team early. It meant we were able to
ask lots of detailed questions and explore whether
what we wanted would actually work. Their
knowledge also meant they could challenge our
design in a positive way which helped us to refine the
solution to best meet our needs.”
Both teams made good use of the existing
communication technology too – once the build and
release schedule was agreed, they used Lync over
Office 365 as a means to communicate and share
desktops, keeping the close working relationship going
even when they weren’t located in the same office.
In December 2013, the first phase of SwireNet was
released, meeting Kev’s specification that the platform
had to be ready to receive content. Post the initial
release there followed a period of intensive knowledge
transfer from the Silversands team to make sure that
Swire Oilfield Services was happy to take over content
management and governance responsibilities in the
run-up to ‘go-live’ in March 2014.
“What made this project so rewarding,” said Colin
Gray, Account Manager at Silversands, “was the
amount of interest it generated throughout the Swire
Oilfield Services organisation. We had people from all
parts of the business from the CIO down requesting
input because they could see the possibilities that the
platform had to offer.”
For the Swire Oilfield Services team, the project has
been a very positive experience that has helped to
take them one step closer to achieving their vision of
a low-cost, highly effective, cloud-based technology
infrastructure.
“It’s been a great experience working with
Silversands” says Ashleigh, “they have a wonderful
attitude to work and their ability to flex and change as
the vision evolved made them an outstanding partner
to work with.”
As for Kev’s vision, he can see it’s well underway:
“SwireNet was always designed to be the building
blocks of how the Swire Oilfield Services teams work
together. From small things like reducing the amount
of emails that contain attachments, to helping us
deliver a range of workflow tools and apps that really
will change the way that we do business. Working
with Silversands has meant that we have a solid
cloud-based collaboration platform that not only works
well today, but will continue to deliver to us long into
the future.”
Call 01202 360 000 or visit www.silversands.co.uk for more information