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Utsler told a recent industry luncheon in Perth that when he arrived at Woodside in December 2013 the company had a continuous improvement program with six people who had worked to train 200 people on such principles.
While the 12 ideas this produced from some 4100 employees was a good start, the following year Woodside overhauled its approach with a bottom-up approach of asking the workforce what they wanted to change and what their ideas were, as opposed to a top-down approach.
By the end of 2014 Woodside had delivered $118 million worth of cost reductions, efficiency improvements and savings from 990 ideas generated by 330 people that had been implemented and used in the organisation and could be tracked by the workforce to show what they had delivered.
In 2015 they got better, producing 5700 ideas from 2700 employees and contractors, generating over $600 million of returns.
Utsler said this contributed to Woodside reducing the cost of producing a barrel equivalent of hydrocarbons by 40% year on year for the last three years - a record performance.
This year Woodside used the year of the Olympics as a motivational theme, and now has more than 12,000 ideas implemented from more than 6000 people, contractors and ‘Woodsiders".
"It is about getting every person, every company involved in helping us to identify solutions and putting it in their hands and feeling empowered to actually deliver," he said.
Such collaboration and supply chain input is a tangible example of what Deloitte's new national oil and gas leader Bernadette Cullinane told < i>Energy New < /i> that industry needs - some "serious consideration" of their ideas.
As previously reported in Energy News, Woodside is also heavily involved in data analytics and cognitive computing, which are actually solving the problems of operators, producers, marketers and drillers alike.
"It's a massive step change in the ability to take seismic data to interpret. It's like taking a 300mm lense versus a 3mm lense in terms of clarity," Utsler said.
"We were one of the first oil and gas entities to bring Watson - IBM's cognitive computing platform - into our arena to look at how to use it.
"It's now helping us understand oil and gas and driving uniquely different ways of doing business."
Utsler also revealed how far modularisation has come. He said about 80 modules were required to build the liquefaction train of Pluto, the first modular LNG plant constructed. In Australia.
Today a similar modularised facility can be done in just five modules, he said, which means a 20% smaller footprint and 30% less steel used.
Utsler also revealed how 3D printing technology had produced tangible benefits.
"We had a recent event on our North Rankin facility where we broke a piece of switchgear. We took a snapshot of that broken lever, sent it to Monash University who did a 3D scan of the picture, and we printed a new switchgear and installed it," he said.
"Through conventional sources we were told it would take eight weeks of being offline with 50% of our production; 72 hours later we were back online."
Collaboration lag
While industry has been saying for the last two years that in order to survive it must collaborate, Utsler conceded that "we're still struggling with real tangible examples as industry".
One bright hope, however, is ‘Project Symphony', where operators are starting to make headway in areas of sharing the ways in which they do business.
"Contractors are doing the same, but there's more work for all of us to really drive operational excellence to compete in a world with higher expectations about what we deliver," he said.
The key to new ideas, he said, was to "start small, grow fast", while being given the space to fail, but that's a tough attitude shift to make in an industry where failure is costly on margins that are very thin.
Regardless, he said, "without the sense and opportunity of creating space for people to fail, you will get mediocrity".
"We have to decide what that looks like, because the world is changing in its expectation of our industry," Utsler said.
"Our challenge of going from surviving to thriving lies in the very hands of the people we work with, that we have working for us, and that we find ways to leverage and use the best of industry, and the best of all industries to find solutions that allow us to compete."
