One reason oil and gas companies adopt a standard cost coding system is to facilitate benchmarking. NORSOK Z-014 Standard Cost Coding System (SCCS) is an example of this kind of system. This paper describes a set of issues found in a project that attempted to adopt this standard. These were issues whose analysis revealed problems with the standard’s fundamental structure. Further analysis showed that these types of problems are well understood outside the project controls community and resolvable using a classification technique technically known as ‘facets’. The paper provides examples of these issues and indicates how they can be resolved. It also describes the systematic modernization approach adopted by the project to resolve the issues throughout the standard. The aim of this paper is to introduce to the project controls community an understanding of the importance of these issues for raising the quality of their data and the new techniques to provide improved foundations for standard cost coding systems for the oil and gas industry in the 21st Century.

The Upstream Oil and Gas industry is formed of a complex network of contractual structures, highly specialised technical disciplines and technologies that interact across multilateral supply chains for exploration and production of hydrocarbons. The complexity comes with a number of technical, social and environmental risks may affect entire regions and countries. One of the key challenges that organisations face in this industry, is ensuring interoperability across organisational and functional boundaries due to the highly stratified supply chain and deeply specialised technical domains that it creates. This presentation will describe the strategy used to build a robust common foundation for the data; at the centre of which is a stable and resilient data architecture for the oil industry. It will explain how this was achieved including the use of structured foundational design principles and industry data standards including ISO 15926, IDEAS and MODEM.