Why Leverage a Robust Intranet Solution for Energy Companies?

Taking the diverse and extreme nature of the oil and gas industry, the multistage processes like extraction, refining of natural resources, and gas generation might involve employees of varied skills and must be often located at the remotest locations. This makes access to the right information at the right time even more important. Speed, convenience, and ease of document access are facilitated for smooth functioning and seamless information flows.

A robust intranet solution for energy companies is an ideal choice for optimizing processes like remote offshore operations, oil field exploration, extraction, refining, and recovery. Despite incongruent geographical locations and highly fluctuating connectivity, it ensures access to the right information in real-time while enhancing employee engagement.

How Does an Intranet for the Oil and Gas Industry Help Overcome Workplace Challenges?

1. Brings Employee Directory and Payroll at One Platform

The ease of communication and collaboration is the foremost advantage of leveraging an intranet solution for energy companies. The employee directory within the same interface is also a helpful tool for instantly contacting anyone, even when the employees are at dispersed locations. The unified corporate portal offered by SharePoint-based intranet consolidates employee profiles and stores and shares their payroll details for better management of remunerations and claim reimbursements.

2. Deliver Quality Services with In-Built Productivity Tools

Leveraging the SharePoint-based intranet platform for energy sectors allows seamless integration with Microsoft 365 productivity applications, including Power BI, Power Automate, OneDrive, Outlook, and more. The modern digital solution maps the exploring, extraction, and refining processes to utmost perfection and helps implementing smart business solutions with in-built productivity tools for a significant boost in production. Such digital transformation in the midstream oil and gas sector results in improving production efficiency.

3. Central Repository for Regulatory Documents, Approval Mandates, And Test Results

An intranet solution for energy companies is designed specifically to cater to their needs for efficient document control and management. It helps in managing varied projects and assists project participants to create, process, and deliver numerous cross-discipline documents, regulatory guidelines, government approvals, and lab test results. Thus, ensuring tight control over the creation, modification, and approval of important documents for the complete project lifecycle.

4. Personalized Workspace for Employees   

The dedicated employee center offered by the intranet proves ideal for formalizing and centralizing communication among employees. It helps employees send or receive actionable messages regarding emergency alerts, updates, changes of plans, share references, and much more. Also, creating personalized sites in the SharePoint environment helps employees effortlessly access their key tasks, projects, documents, and resources, hence improving their overall productivity.

5. Dedicated Workspace for Different Teams and Projects

Project managers can seamlessly navigate through all the running project details. They can even create new ones, edit the existing ones, and manage the process for each of the oil/gas extraction sites. It also allows a separate page for each project and its departments, which has all the necessary information associated with it, like location, area, temperature, language, working schedules, and shift details.

Furthermore, the separate project sites allow managers to assign, manage, and track tasks and set priorities. For instance, the project manager overseeing drilling operations can easily create checklists, assign responsibility for setting up equipment, monitor safety checks and data logging, and assess them from the same platform. Also, setting up role-based access can help them assign only the eligible person to the task, thus ensuring accountability for it.

6. Real-Time Project Status and Insights

An intranet platform for the energy sector allows a centralized project management platform that has customized dashboards for live status and progress updates. It enables supervisors to control the entire project like store project documentation, share task sheets instantly, host conferences to discuss project-related issues, emergency alerts in real-time, and allocate tasks during the project cycle.

7. Automated Workflows for Field Exploration

The SharePoint-based intranet for the oil and gas industry enables automated document workflows that compass the complete document cycle at departmental and inter-departmental levels. The industry-specific business processes demand the highest level of data accuracy, minimal manual work, and scope of errors. Therefore, automated workflows not only reduce employees’ efforts spent on elaborate documentation but also shorten the overall document cycles. Ultimately, this will make workflow management quick and efficient.

8. Employee Safety Management

Employee safety becomes the foremost priority for organizations working in high-risk environments like drilling sites, refineries, and more, which are prone to explosions and chemical exposure. However, strictly adhering to the safety guidelines and compliances becomes easy with an intranet. An accessible knowledge base with updated safety protocols, policies, and emergency procedures, creating employee safety checklists, and encouraging employees to report safety incidents can avoid accidents and safety breaches. Furthermore, an intranet solution for energy companies can be easily leveraged to set up automated safety alerts and notifications, weather details for outdoor operations, and scheduling events for safety inspections to strengthen the efforts towards safety management.

9. Role-Based Security Access Controls

In a cognitive production environment like oil and gas exploration, a lot of crucial data and confidential information is exchanged. However, an intranet allows teams to set up a secure, centralized, and password-protected space for document sharing. This space is operated on role-based access control, where managers can access and edit the document while team members can only view it. Access rights are pre-defined based on your role, designation, position, or team.

10. Manage Compliance Requirements

Regulatory environments like the oil and gas sector have numerous compliance requirements, including operational safety and health, environmental compliance, emergency preparedness and response compliance, and many more. Adhering to these is crucial to ensuring ethical standards, reducing risks, and creating safer working environments. Intranet offers centralized repositories to store all the compliance documents, SOPs, and training materials, coupled with robust document control features like versioning and co-authoring, which ensures that employees can access and collaborate on the latest versions. Also, leveraging automated workflows for policy distribution, easy compliance reporting (through forms), and routing incident reports can reduce manual intervention and ensure consistency across organizations.

BizPortals 365, a SharePoint-based intranet for the oil and gas industry, is a centralized platform to help them manage dispersed teams, scattered documents, and multiple projects from one place. With dedicated space to store and organize safety protocols, compliance reports, industry-based best practices, and more, it offers exceptional collaborative features like co-authoring, versioning, document sharing, and task tracking to infuse efficiency into the overall operational processes.