CONNECTING KAZAKHSTAN
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
CONNECTING KAZAKHSTAN Digital transformation is a fundamental piece in the growth plans of many Central Asian countries, including Kazakhstan. The team at North Caspian Operating Company, the largest offshore oil and gas producer in the country, takes Digital Bulletin behind the scenes of its new innovative initiatives
AUTHOR: Beatriz Valero de Urquía PROJECT DIRECTOR: Jack Walsh VIDEOGRAPHER: Tony Thrussell
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he past two years have forced the world to adapt, and Kazakhstan has been no exception. Faced with the national lockdown and historically low oil prices that came with the COVID-19 pandemic, the country set its sights on digital transformation as the way forward, a process that will bring more than $30 trillion in revenue to the global economy in the next decade. Three years before COVID began, Kazakhstan had already launched its first major digital initiative. The Digital Kazakhstan programme is focused on accelerating the development pace of the country through the implementation of digital technologies in key sectors of its economy with the goal of becoming one of the top 30 global economies by 2050. 4
The programme has a clear protagonist: North Caspian Operating Company (NCOC), the Operator under the Production Sharing Agreement in respect of the North Caspian Sea dated 18 November 1997 (the “NCSPSA”) and the largest offshore oil and gas producer in the country. Change is a key part of NCOC’s DNA. The shareholders of NCOC are seven companies (including National Company KMG, Agip CS, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Total Energies, China National Petroleum Corporation and Inpex). In 2009 North Caspian Operating Company B.V. becomes a new Operator under the NCSPSA, with Agip KCO, NCPOC, EMKI and SDK as agent companies, replacing Agip KCO which had acted as Operator since 2001. In 2015 NCOC N.V.
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becomes a single Operator for the North Caspian Project. The transition to virtual work provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic was just another step in the company’s transformative journey. “A company’s ability to transform and change is becoming more and more important,” says Adam Lowmass, a former Company’s employee who was NCOC’s Transformation Manager when COVID-19 begun and therefore became the man tasked with the responsibility of overseeing the company’s digital transition. “NCOC’s ability to transform and its history of successfully going through these transformations gives it a competitive advantage over other companies,” Lowmass says.
Before the spring of 2020, the majority of the NCOC staff relied on office desktops and in-person meetings to access and share information. Overnight, that disappeared. Projects that the company had had in the pipeline for months had to be implemented in a matter of weeks. “It showed that a digital transformation can be very quick,” Lowmass says. “It doesn’t have to take years or months to put something in place. Previously, a lot of people were sceptical that it could be done, but COVID really showed the durability of the digital strategy.” In less than 15 days, NCOC completely transformed its operations and transitioned to online work. In an era when oil prices often fluctuate, NCOC’s digital
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NCOC’s ability to transform and its history of successfully going through these transformations gives it a competitive advantage over other companies” Adam Lowmass
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+ Adam Lowmass transformation strategy has been designed to ensure that the company can extract maximum value from its business by improving its efficiency, processes and output quality. “There are opportunities to introduce new digital/IT technologies to get better insights, to extract more value, and to enable new ways of working,” says Roelant Kas, the company’s Technical IT Manager. “The automation of the processes has really helped to increase efficiency, reduce costs and to make life easier for our people.” As part of this commitment to transformation and digitalisation, NCOC created for the first time the role of Head of Digital, a position now held by Natalya Taylor. She explains how the pandemic provided NCOC with the final push to implement a series of projects that had been a long time coming, such as automating
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internal and external reports and developingdata visualisation tools for the production management. “We are growing and developing and realising what’s most important for our business,” Taylor says Over the years, NCOC has established a solid digital/IT Service Foundation, through its data centres, striking the right balance between on-premise and cloud computing; reliable & secure operations for field telecoms, IT infrastructure, end-user computing services; professional information, data & analytics capabilities; mature application & platform services to support specific business process automation. This transformation has allowed the company to create real-time dashboards and analytics platforms that will help NCOC better understand its business, and how to improve it to future-proof the organisation.
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“Data is at the heart of digital,” Kas says. “Access to quality-assured data, and building analytics capabilities is key to enabling any digital transformation. “With the digital foundation that we have in place, a fair amount of our NCOC business processes are digitised and automated. This has tremendously increased the efficiency of our employees and reduced our costs. For example, we recently introduced our HR end-to-end platform and we have also introduced mobile solutions for field operations to make life easier for them.” These new capabilities are completely transforming NCOC’s ways of working.
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However, in order to ensure that NCOC could implement them effectively and leverage its full capabilities, the company relied on its trusted partnership ecosystem, rooted in deep and collaborative partnerships with suppliers and vendors. When the world ground to a halt, these partnerships prove to be crucial. Cisco has provided the backbone of all IT network infrastructure and connectivity for NCOC. As one of the leading technology companies, Cisco is committed to realising the vision of Digital Kazakhstan and has been part of many initiatives to help its businesses flourish in the new digital era,
“Cisco brought its vast experience to NCOC and helped make the company’s transformation and journey successful” Adam Lowmass, NCOC’s former Transformation Manager
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Data is at the heart of digital. Access to quality-assured data, and building analytics capabilities is key to enabling any digital transformation” Roelant Kas
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including NCOC. The company’s expertise and technology know-how have powered NCOC’s transition and helped the company adapt to new ways of working. “Cisco brought its vast experience to NCOC and helped make the company’s transformation and journey successful,” Lowmass says. But the transition to remote work could not have been successfully implemented without one key player: Microsoft. As a long-term partner of NCOC, Microsoft has been fundamental to
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NCOC’s digitalisation journey. Similarly to many businesses around the world, NCOC relied fully on Microsoft Teams as its main platform for virtual collaboration during Kazakhstan’s lockdown and leveraged Azure Virtual Desktop to successfully transition to remote work. In addition, NCOC implemented an Enterprise Data Platform based on Microsoft Azure and Power BI, to better leverage data analytics, The company used Agile to grow the platform and ensured that it contained clean datasets for specific use cases. “Power BI is really powerful and provides a lot of flexibility and opportunities to visualise the data and make it more readable and understandable,” Taylor says. Partnerships have been key to NCOC’s transition. But, at the end of the day, the true heart of the company lies within its people. For NCOC, all its employees are part of one family, from its directors to its contractors. During the pandemic, the company has been working tirelessly to care for the mental health of all its employees and ensure their health and safety. “Our key to success is people, their attitude, commitment and focus, and the fact that we just love our company and love our country and we want to keep producing to support the economy of Kazakhstan,” Taylor says. “That’s the main key to success, not only in this pandemic but in general, in any kind of crisis.”
On March 13th, 2020, Mansur Nazarov, NCOC’s Communications Advisor was preparing to leave the country. He was getting everything ready for his trip when he received a call from the company informing him that all business trips had been banned and that he would have to begin working from home. Mansur was frustrated when he heard the news, but now he’s glad he was able to stay with his family and is thankful for the personal support that the company has provided through the crisis. For people like Mansur, more than the salary rises and the broadband provisions, it is NCOC’s preoccupation with employees’ families that he is most thankful for. Given the fundamental role that people play in any company’s success, one of NCOC’s key priorities was ensuring that its employees received the support they needed to reach their full potential. This 11
was one of the drivers behind the HR responsibility for their own development,” transformation project, which looked to Assel says. “They can track and manage create a single HR platform where data was their career path in a more efficient way, meaningful and easily accessible. and the solution gives a lot of “NCOC needed an integrated opportunity from the transparsystem to manage all HR applicaency perspective, interaction with tions to maintain data the employees, and integrity and financial to optimise most of exposure, in order to the HR processes.” study the company’s It is because of HR needs,” says NCOC’s commitAssel Nakhimova, ment to people that, IT Project Lead at when it came to NCOC. choosing a partner To achieve this, to support NCOC’s Assel’s team HR transformacombined the tion project, the power of cloudcompany selected based solution TerraLink. The Success Factors international IT and Natalya Taylor and the company’s business consulting on-premise system to company has a very create one single HR strong presence in platform. Although it Kazakhstan - it has is still early to gauge the largest SAP team the success of the in the region - as project, NCOC has well as an approach already been able that focuses on to reduce its siloed developing local systems, increase talent, that perfectly process efficiency aligns with NCOC’s and transparency, mission. promoting data integrity across the company. TerraLink was present throughout “Success Factor allows employees to NCOC’s transformation from a consortium manage their own personal data and take into a single company in 2013, when it
Our key to success is definitely people: their attitude, their commitment, their focus, and the fact that we just love our company and love our country”
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In Partnership: TerraLink In Partnership: TerraLink TerraLink has been vital to NCOC’s transition into the digital era, providing support in the areas of SAP consultancy, support, maintenance, information management and development and enhancement services.
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helped it merge the IT system of all its subsidiaries and address the issues that came with duplicated data and information systems. Since then, TerraLink has provided NCOC with support in the areas of SAP consultancy, support, maintenance, development and enhancement services, but also in relation to information management, consultancy and service provision. In addition to HR transformation and the transition to remote work, another area where digitalisation directly impacts people’s lives is related to safety., Taylor’s vision is to use digital tools to track every step of the supply chain, and utilise drones to conduct specialised monitoring of pipelines, thereby reducing the technician’s exposure to toxic fluids or ultrahigh pressures. “Hardware and software tools can protect the environment, people and company assets,” Taylor says. “The digital space gives us plenty of opportunities worldwide, you know, to simplify, to stay safe, and to grow.” This concern for employee safety was present before the pandemic. Until February 2021, the company was a couple of days short of reaching its goal of going one full year without a single lost time injury recorded on its sites, which Mansur considers “a great achievement.” Kas adds: “It’s all about people: how
they adapt, continue to learn and improve. In NCOC we have great teams working together in an ecosystem of industry partners, suppliers, and government stakeholders.” With its digital transformation projects, NCOC wants to be an example for Kazakhstan, and it aims to support the country’s goal of becoming more digitally advanced. Moreover, the company is passionate about training its country’s youth, to ensure that the new generation of Kazakhs has the necessary skills to drive the country forward into the digital era. “Kazakhstan is a very dynamic developing country with lots of young talent, particularly interested in digital. So it’s a very bright future, not only for NCOC but also for Kazakhstan as a whole.” 17
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