Serica Energy has turned to OpenText to improve operational excellence across its engineering projects. The UK-based oil and gas company is moving to OpenText Content Cloud and OpenText Extended ECM for Engineering to manage its document assets.
Muhi Majzoub, EVP & Chief Product Officer at OpenText, said, “Energy companies are under intense pressure to deliver more reliable and sustainable energy without compromising the health of their employees, the safety of the communities they serve, or the environment in which they operate.
“More than 75% of the top 100 energy and engineering organizations rely on OpenText for enterprise information management to achieve operational excellence through improved collaboration, reduced operational risk and secure, seamless access to engineering drawings and other asset content.”
Why has Serica chosen OpenText?
Serica has said that this deal is about the efficient control of its information and processes. As an oil and gas company operating platforms in the North Sea, it is also about evidencing how it meets tough compliance controls.
Before this deal, Serica used Microsoft SharePoint as its document management platform. However, it says that SharePoint became inefficient as its documentation requirements increased. It said, “Document control processes were manual and labor intensive, and the impact of accessing incorrect versions would be catastrophic.”
Interestingly, SharePoint is a general-purpose document store, not a specialist product. The same applies to OpenText Content Cloud, it is a standard content management solution like SharePoint. Serica has also added the Extended ECM for the Engineering component.
Serica chose OpenText because of its widespread use across the oil and gas industry. OpenText has also invested heavily in building industry-focused solutions, especially for industries with extremely large assets to manage. That integration is about asset management and process and risk management across those verticals.
Serica also praised OpenText’s integration with its current business applications. While it didn’t name those applications, OpenText ECM is heavily integrated with Salesforce, SAP, and Microsoft 365, which will reduce the engineering challenge of deploying OpenText.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This is a good move by Serica as it looks to reduce risk across its business and streamline information processes and document handling. It also aligns it with the bigger players in the energy sector, who also use OpenText. That means it doesn’t have to retrain people on IT systems as it continues to strengthen its management and workforce.
It also represents another successful company captured by OpenText in the oil and gas market, this time at Microsoft’s expense. What will concern the latter is the statement that SharePoint was inefficient as its document requirements increased. For OpenText, that statement is important. It shows its ability to scale to even the most complex document needs.
The integration with key business apps is also important. Nobody wants to change core business applications or spend months writing bespoke integrations when they change other parts of the IT stack.
