But in recent years, PDO has expanded its scope and is moving towards becoming a fully-fledged energy company, with renewables and a green agenda playing an increasingly important part.

As Oman’s national oil company, PDO also plays an important part in the country’s economic expansion and diversification, providing support in areas such as job creation and training, developing local expertise and promoting numerous social investment programs. And to enable it to manage the various assets, resources and technologies that are required for its non-hydrocarbon functions, the business contracted Carillion Alawi LLC to provide Integrated Facilities Management (IFM) across its 12 locations.

Since the start of the relationship back in 2013, the IFM team at PDO has worked tirelessly to help implement new technologies and drive new efficiencies. In early 2018, the team turned its focus to the company’s ERP platform, which was being used to manage IFM processes.

To support the desired CAFM and real estate business processes, Carillion Alawi helped PDO migrate from its previous solution to a cloud-based instance of IBM® Maximo® Application Suite in late 2018. The new platform now oversees PDO’s corrective maintenance and planned maintenance activities, and more recently, the online management of linear assets, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, mobility and the company’s customer portal. The Maximo solution also handles the related reporting for over 60,000 maintainable assets.

“It’s covering everything spread across 12 PDO sites,” explains Abri. “Hard maintenance, environmental, catering, cleaning—all the usual core facilities management functions in our locations both in the interior and on the coast.”

Alongside the migration, Carillion Alawi was also able to launch a new customer portal and corresponding Android app, backed by IBM Maximo Anywhere software, that lets users access the CAFM environment from their own devices.

With the core system launched in late 2018, PDO quickly wanted to expand the scope of the solution, making use of other already integrated modules.

“We also wanted to update stock and inventory control,” continues Abri. “Up to that point, the IFM team had largely been using manual, paper-driven processes that involved lengthy approvals—around 45 days—to procure any new spare parts. Altogether, we were using over 70,000 sheets of paper each year, which resulted in high energy and printing costs.”

To implement this next phase, PDO and Carillion Alawi engaged IBM Business Partner Praxis Solutions.

“After the initial discovery sessions, we realized that while Carillion Alawi had established a comprehensive procurement process for PDO, there were still some challenges with maintenance response times for the procurement team,” recounts Ankit Jain, Solutions Architect and Managing Partner at Praxis. “So we worked with the Carillion Alawi team to digitize the entire contracts, procurement and inventory management process, while ensuring that both Carillion Alawi and PDO had full visibility into the process steps.”

The Praxis team routed the IFM supply chain efforts through IBM Maximo Asset Management software, using the solution to oversee inventory management, replenishment and purchasing. Working with Carillion Alawi, it also established item standards for corporate real estate across PDO and developed an electronic asset catalogue for IFM needs, leading to the cleansing and cataloging of over 11,000 products.

“Now, we’re working to further enhance process visibility and extend the IBM Maximo implementation through analytics,” adds Jain. “We are deploying various KPIs, reports and dashboards, which will allow Carillion Alawi and PDO to have further, measurable insights into their process effectiveness and empower them to further tune those processes towards excellence.”