Chevron - Capital Equipment Quality Assurance Screening

Customer Profile

Chevron is a world leader in the energy market with integrated companies providing both exploration and production as well as manufacturing, products and transmission. Chevron also has interests in chemicals, mining, power operations and technology innovation in alternative energy. Chevron has a strong culture of organizational safety.

Business Situation - The Challenge

Despite its own stringent quality assurance program, Chevron experienced multi-million dollars in lost time and revenue when a newly acquired piece of equipment failed to perform its basic task. Blame could be placed on the original vendor for poor quality assurance, but if the Chevron had been able to per-screen the product with its own quality assurance program, the loss may have been avoided. Chevron asked Aptia Systems to provide a business process solution to help standardize quality assurance for major capital projects across the entire organization.

Solution

We created a Central Pre-screen Quality Management Program for the customer. Aptia provided an economical, scalable web-based solution to meet Chevron’s need to better control its business operations and reduce costs associated with critical equipment failure.

We designed and built the first and third (of three) phases of the Central Pre-screen Quality Management Program. The first phase allowed the company to design entire quality assurance processes and share the processes between business units. Business units were able to create projects and documentation from existing, standardized, working processes, and then further modify those processes as needed.

In keeping with a trend in American business, Chevron later moved its information technology operations offshore and contracted with a company in India for development of Phase Two of the program. A year later, a frustrated Chevron contacted Aptia, this time to undo the confusion created by the offshore contractor. After reviewing the situation and the customers's requirements, we spent 7% (based on actual hours provided by Chevron) of the time contracted by the offshore company to rewrite and successfully implement the third phase of the program.

Benefits

• Concise data driven system relies on easy to use, electronic form-based data entry
• Self-indexing allows quick and accurate cross referencing to relevant data
• User-friendly system with simple functions for implementation of updates and modifications
• Data model awareness with self-monitoring of its own database
• Intuitive and easy to use even for computer illiterates