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New Year’s greeting 2023

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Epsis News

New Year’s greetings from Jan-Erik

Our CEO, Jan-Erik Nordtvedt, has written a few words about the past year:

The year 2022 is coming to an end and I’m taking the opportunity to take a break to think. Unfortunately, the pandemic was with us into 2022 as well, and there has been a lot of hard work for many as a result – both here and elsewhere in the world. It has been really challenging, but also very rewarding. For us, the biggest single event is the launch of our product, Enify. In this regard, we have been given the opportunity to talk to people across many different industries and markets. National and international. The operations center market, where we have been for almost 20 years, is definitely not just within oil and gas where we have had our focus, and getting to know energy and the fishing industry better, for example, has given us an incredible amount of learning.

During the last couple of years, most companies have carried out a “rapid digitalisation” of their business. In our meetings with people, with managers, middle managers and engineers, we ask about the effect it has on us people. How all these new solutions can produce the desired effect and not least how to capitalize on all the opportunities new technologies bring to our everyday working life. It’s not just simple to put it that way – but what’s really exciting is that the buzzword is “people” – or the human or operative element if you like. We are making a concerted effort to ensure that 2023 will be the year when the operatives will really get help in their digital working day. This is what we believe in – and in our last major project in 2022, we are focusing on precisely this; how to interact better when you are sitting in many different places and have to contribute from several different companies to make an operation run efficiently and not least safely. When we get to help solve such problems together with the customer, we are both happy and motivated for the further digital journey.

We thank all connections, customers and good friends for the year that is now coming to an end, and wish everyone a Happy New Year!

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Virtual Operations Centers

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Epsis News

What is a Virtual Operations Center (VOC)?

It is an Operations Center whose purpose is to support various parts of the operational operations in your company. The fact that it is virtual implies that personnel can work from different locations, and connect virtually instead of meeting in a common room.

Meeting virtually became a real problem overnight when Covid-19 hit and in this regard, Epsis together with Equinor, Woodside and with solid support from Innovation Norway wanted to take a closer look at the problem; – “How to create good solutions for integrated teams who work from different locations and meet in a virtual space to ensure a good understanding of the situation and operations.”

Virtual Operations Center/ Operations center environments are often characterized by having the following activities:

Shift work
24/7 operation
A lot of information to process
Several operations to be followed up more or less simultaneously
Switch between different tasks (analysis, monitoring, project and events)

Throughout the project, together with operative personnel, we have looked at the way of working in various centers (Emergency, Subsea, Logistics, drilling and well, geo operations and telecommunications). Furthermore, we have looked at requirements for further development of Epsis’ software system to be able to support operations regardless of location. The software has been developed based on the needs of operative personnel who work in and in connection with the centres.

Challenges: lack of digital effectiveness and structure

70+ applications are used daily in medium-sized organizations

Workers switch between tasks 20+ times a day

Daily work consists of several interruptions from various technologies and through unstructured collaboration

The number of available screens is challenging when gaining situational awareness

Time is valuable, and wastes of time are notable

The project needs has resulted in the following functional areas in the application:

1. Screen control

The number of screens and screen layouts vary greatly, and in the centers with large screen walls, managing information takes time. It is therefore useful to have an application to manage this

2. Information collections

The number of applications and clicks within various applications to find relevant information for managing a task or a facility is time-consuming. Remembering where things are located/long paths means that you sometimes do not retrieve relevant information from one system or that you store copies locally. It saves time for employees to have one application to go to to find everything they need across documents, processes, tasks and applications

3. Task switching

The everyday working life of these operational environments is made up of structured tasks and more event-oriented tasks that occasionally interrupt a structured task. It takes time to find focus between tasks, and it takes time to find the information you need to perform different types of tasks. It is useful to have a system where everything you need to perform a task is available.

4. Shared understanding of the situation

Everyday work consists of ensuring that everyone who works together can quickly achieve an equal understanding of the situation for various tasks and events. For this, you would like to have environments with shared screens and of course the employees’ own work area. For this, it can be useful to be able to share more than one information element and, not least, that the information that belongs together is placed on the screen surfaces so that it is easy for the recipients to absorb. Enify can help with this.

Result

Find relevant information – across systems
Find information and quickly change the focus – easy to switch between tasks.
Sharing information – sharing sets of links/information
Have one system for navigating many – with a single keystroke
Smart multitasking – Dividing users screens into layouts allows one to work with several applications simultaneously
Always have the same work surface – no matter where you log on from

  1. One team saved 30 min per day.
  2. One team managed to keep the operation running 100% when they had to close the center and float in a home office.
  3. The cost of building a virtual operation center vs. a physical one is much more affordable.

Enify – Software for IOC Enify webpage

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Life in the Clouds – Epsis recently transitioned to be a cloud-based organization

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Life in the Clouds

Epsis recently transitioned to be a cloud-based organization discarding decades of legacy network infrastructure. Why did we do it? Here are our 5 top reasons…

Written by Alex Clark

The technology is ready. 

1. IT strategy is often a battle between the best way of doing something versus legacy obstacles and user practicality. You constantly have to assess the technology landscape and the offerings from the major technology providers. At some point, the new way of doing things will overcome the old way. More importantly, the ability to transition between the two becomes simpler. Users will never accept a loss of capability in the name of progress, so we remained cautious. Once we realized all our core application portfolio providers had cloud versions, it made sense to transition with their guidance and support. Finally, reliable, cost-effective Internet is now available everywhere, whether provided by 5G, fiber, copper, or new generation satellite services like Starlink. This means there are no longer any potential blockers between our users and the tools they wish to use on the cloud.

We were part way there already.

  1. We are not a huge company. Much of our workforce can be mobile in nature, so we are very used to dealing with online files, web-based resources & remote collaboration. Moving files from existing servers to cloud-based repositories was relatively easy and simplified things for everyone. So when we decided to move, we only needed to focus on the last few legacy applications, how to print items and improve endpoint security. Something we could handle with relative ease over a few months. We still had a load of poorly structured files and documents which we just threw onto the cloud as they were. Trying to fix the structure simultaneously as moving data would probably prevent us from doing either. Many users and teams had added structure by moving their important stuff over previously, so the remaining files were of lower importance. We could sort it out later, just as needed, if at all.

It is simpler 

The worst place to be is trapped between 2 worlds. Are files on my machine, my OneDrive, or a file server? Due to some of our workforce working a lot of the time remotely, this is the place we often find ourselves. Saying everything is “on OneDrive” makes it easy for us. Moving to the cloud allowed a lot of similar improvement and simplification exercises. It made software selection easier, too, as we had precise non-functional requirements for our timesheet or accounting systems; to be cloud-based. Some of our existing providers had something in their portfolio, and they could manage the transition for us. Hardware failure does not matter anymore as we don’t need to recover anything. Any Internet connection will let us get working again. New machine installations are faster and more accessible and can be done by the user; anywhere. All the complicated stuff we had to deal with in the past gradually vanished. 

 

It is not any more expensive. 

Nothing gets done if it is going to cost more. Resources are tight, and you can’t splash money around on vanity projects or “ideal world” scenarios. IT costs were creeping up as we brought cloud-based services alongside legacy systems out of need. Our legacy hardware costs could be eliminated if we made the transition. Hardware & service contracts, technology refreshes, support contracts, time to troubleshoot & manage our servers, backup costs, perimeter security costs, and others that arrive as unexpected surprises. There may be some upfront costs to help the transition, but the ongoing costs are no higher and far more easily controlled. No more hidden fees or unwelcome surprises! 

 

It is more secure

  1.  I hate to admit it; Microsoft is better at security than Epsis. It could be due to them having 3,500 security engineers and spending $4 billion a year on security… It is a close match to our capability, but they edge the win! We don’t need to worry about backups. We have one set of security policy management that works across all our files. GDPR is now manageable. We have no half-forgotten legacy infrastructure. We now have bleeding-edge enterprise-grade AI-enabled security available on tap. For other solutions from other vendors, they take responsibility for the security. Instead, we can spend time on the only genuine threats left. Staff awareness & training alongside improved user authentication and better endpoint security for all devices used to access company resources, whether they are owned by Epsis or not.

And we won’t stop here. Our next task is to eliminate passwords, and we are most of the way there. We need to live in a world where our passwords don’t matter anymore. They are a security nightmare and are not required when we have mobile devices able to act as multifactor authentication tokens. So our journey continues… our next stop is to be a password-less cloud-based company.

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Nine Key Learnings from working in projects across 3 continents and 15 time zones.

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Epsis News

When the pandemic hit us, we had to change the way we delivered projects. As we have been preaching about digitalization for years, we in many ways took our own medicine: We digitized the business – changed the way we worked, and most importantly, our technology and the way it was used and delivered. And we met customers who were brave enough to say, “we want you to deliver this project 100% remotely.” So, we put together teams with participation from Norway, US, UK, and Australia.

There are of course a lot of learnings in such projects – and we are still on the learning curve! But here are some key learnings to share from our experience so far:

  1. First of all – you need to have a brave team! A team that understands the premises of the projects – the goals, the processes for how its run, and the transparency in the communication and steps. The team will potentially have to use new/different technology as everything is remote.
  2. The team needs to work all digital – no files in local storage. This enables us to build on each other’s work while someone is sleeping.
  3. The projects need to have a local sponsor – meaning someone in the client organization needs to secure that everyone is prioritizing to attend meetings and to perform tasks. This requires too much time if it’s left all to a remote project manager.
  4. You need to have a good introduction meeting to gain trust with the team – this has turned out to be easier as we have gone deeper into the pandemic.
  5. The team need to set clear boundaries from the start:
  • when can we meet?
  • when are we online/offline?
  • what expectations are there regarding other competing tasks at the office?
  • when will what be delivered?
  • how will we communicate?

6. Follow up meetings with the project sponsor needs to be held on a regular basis, to adjust, help and support the project manager.

7. Don’t underestimate context – and realize that it is harder to get the context right for e everyone when we are all digital. Allow for some extra time to get that right – it pays off!

8. Be flexible and generous and open about the challenges in remote working – that build trust and help take away the added complexity of the situation

9. A key learning is that it is much more can be accomplished in this digital delivery model than what we initially anticipated – in particular if we continue to be conscious of utilizing all tools that are available (such as video, co-editing documents, give/take control over applications)

As we are passionate about the future of work, our take from this type of projects is that traditional business boundaries need to be challenged moving forward – as operations literally can be done 24/7 from anywhere. For this we need new flexible operation models that can leverage the potential. Resulting in less need for travelling and even access to resources you normally wouldn’t be able to access. We are looking forward. #FutureOfWork

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Our product, Enify has now its own website

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Product

Our product, Enify has now its own website

enify.no

Your workday consists of a variety of activities, tools, and information. Often combined with a lot of different roles. We multitask.  There are many time thieves in that process,- switching between roles and tasks. Some say the workday looks like swiss cheese…

The solution is right around the corner,- with Enify a flexible solution for your team’s workday.

To be able to showcase who your team can get value from using Enify, and because we have switched to a subscription model we wanted to give Enify its very own website. Follow us on enify.no

2021 – Year of change

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Epsis News

Our CEO, Jan-Erik Nordtvedt, has written a few words about our change in Epsis:

2021 – Year of change

It has been a bit quiet from us for a while, but then it has also been a really tough year!

Like many others, we were doing well in a pre-pandemic world – with our heads deeply buried in yesterday’s business models. We had large projects in many corners of the world and were well set up for growth. We thought. Through almost twenty years of operation, we had helped our customers with digital transformation of their operations – and were proud of the projects we contributed to, and the results that gave our customers.

But we had to think completely differently when the pandemic hit us. In many ways, we took our own medicine – we digitized the business, changed the way we worked and not least our technology and the way it was used and delivered.

It has been very exciting and correspondingly challenging.

But now we are soon ready!

From having a niche product for oil and gas operations centers, we are now proud to soon be able to launch a much broader product – Enify – to help the knowledge worker find, use and share information in an efficient way in a hybrid workday. We believe that this is the working model of the future – and our goals is to help provide the opportunity for people to be able to work with anything from anywhere.

Delivered as a cloud solution on Microsoft Azure.

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