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Operational Excellence for Oil & Gas Summit

Monday, September 19, 2016 · Anchorage, Alaska

About the Summit

Additional capacity for productivity that already exists in your organization can be found and harnessed through a process based on operational excellence and lean management. Forward-thinking organizations have tapped into this hidden capacity for savings, learning from other sectors and customizing it for the oil and gas sector. This interactive, hands-on Summit Day will provide you with the tools you need to keep costs at a minimum and implement continual improvement.

Summit Schedule

Summit Chair: Rick Reed — Continuous Improvement Trainer and Lean Consultant

8:00
Registration Opens and Refreshments are Served
9:00
Opening Remarks from Summit Chair
Rick Reed, Continuous Improvement Trainer and Lean Consultant
9:15
Getting Down to Basics: How to Leverage Operational Excellence to Dramatically Improve Productivity
  • How does operational excellence differ from other continuous improvement approaches?
  • Identifying the resource bottlenecks that limit your organization's capabilities — how can they be mitigated or overcome to avoid scope creep?
  • Exploring opportunities to reduce the occurrence and duration of lost resources with an awareness of organizational bottlenecks
  • How to make the best use of unassigned or underused resources to drive operational excellence
10:15
Networking Coffee Break
10:30
Creating a Pure Line of Sight between Strategy and Operations to Achieve OpEx Goals
  • Establishing a long-term, strategic focus for operations optimization
  • Aligning financial management with OpEx tools
  • Ensuring you have defined your ultimate goal in adopting continuous improvement practices
  • Determining the required business processes for OpEx and integrating them across the organization
11:15
Culture Change: Transforming Your Initiative from Innovation into Accepted Standard Operating Procedure
  • Getting executive buy-in for OpEx initiatives — knowing what will generate support from management: illustrating cost-benefit and developing an effective pitch
  • A guide to effective communication, consultation and engagement
  • Looking at ways to overcome employees' resistance to change
  • Implementing changes in work systems to support organizational alignment
12:15
Networking Luncheon for Speakers and Delegates
1:15
Root Cause Analysis — Saving Resources by Ensuring You Don't Make the Same Mistake Twice
  • Understanding failure classifications and their initiating causes
  • Balancing competing priorities using root cause analysis
2:00
Reducing Project Risk and Increasing Returns through Operational Excellence
  • Comparing Alaska's productivity rates to other regions with similar conditions
  • Examining the role owners can play in increasing productivity for projects
  • Exploring effective cost controls and scheduling strategies for consistent on-time & on-budget delivery
  • Ensuring the coordination and management of vendors and suppliers to ensure your goals are met
2:45
Networking Refreshment Break in the Exhibit Hall
3:00
Using Data to Increase Operational Excellence — Eliminating Waste, Setting Priorities and Reducing Redundancies
  • Compiling and assessing data to drive best practices
  • Data governance — examining the most effective ways to select, prioritize and measure KPIs
  • Setting goals around technology and ensuring it gives you the answers you need to make data-driven decisions
  • Selecting and interpreting data to generate tangible performance improvement benchmarks
  • Ensuring frontline workers input quality data
3:45
Closing Panel — Leaning Your Organization to Thrive in Today's Market Environment
  • Examples of easy wins that eliminate waste and save resources
  • Coordinating throughout the value chain to align processes, clarify objectives, coordinate metrics and communicate progress
Main Conference Agenda (Sep 20–21)All Expert Speakers

Summit FAQ

The Operational Excellence for Oil & Gas Summit is an interactive, hands-on workshop day that precedes the main Alaska Oil & Gas Congress conference. Held on Monday, September 19, 2016, it is designed to provide oil and gas industry professionals with practical tools and methodologies to identify and harness additional capacity for productivity within their organizations.

The Summit draws on lean management principles and operational excellence frameworks that have been successfully applied in other industrial sectors and customized for oil and gas operations. It is particularly valuable in a low oil price environment where operators must find ways to reduce costs and improve efficiency without compromising safety or quality.

Forward-thinking organizations use the Summit's teachings to transform their operational culture — moving from firefighting to systematic continuous improvement. Participants leave with specific tools, templates, and action plans they can implement immediately in their own organizations.

Operational excellence (OpEx) in oil and gas refers to a systematic approach to improving an organization's performance by eliminating waste, reducing costs, improving productivity, and creating a culture of continuous improvement. It goes beyond one-time efficiency initiatives to embed sustainable improvement processes into everyday operations.

In the oil and gas context, operational excellence encompasses safe and reliable equipment operations, efficient resource utilization, effective supply chain management, disciplined project execution, and data-driven decision-making. World-class operators typically achieve OpEx by adopting frameworks like Lean, Six Sigma, or proprietary continuous improvement methodologies adapted to their specific operational context.

Alaska's oil and gas sector faces particular cost challenges due to its remote location, harsh climate, and complex logistics — making operational excellence not just a competitive advantage but a survival imperative. Companies that successfully implement OpEx principles can significantly improve their economics even in challenging market conditions.

Lean management, originally developed in manufacturing, translates powerfully to oil and gas operations by focusing relentlessly on eliminating non-value-adding activities (waste) from every process. In an oil and gas context, waste can include unnecessary equipment downtime, redundant paperwork, inefficient maintenance procedures, poor parts inventory management, and duplicated communication chains.

The Summit explores how lean principles apply specifically to Alaska's oil and gas sector, including upstream drilling and production operations, midstream pipeline management, and the complex logistics of operating in remote Arctic environments. Case studies from other industrial sectors show how lean can cut costs by 20-30% while improving reliability and safety performance simultaneously.

Critically, lean is not just about cutting costs — it's about creating systems where problems become visible quickly, root causes are addressed systematically, and employees at all levels actively contribute to continuous improvement. This cultural transformation is often the most challenging but also the most durable benefit of lean implementation.

The Summit is designed for senior operational leaders — Vice Presidents of Operations, Operations Managers, Production Superintendents, Maintenance Managers, and Project Managers — who are responsible for improving efficiency and reducing costs in their organizations. It is equally valuable for C-suite executives seeking a strategic overview of how operational excellence programs can transform their companies' performance.

Finance leaders who want to understand the operational drivers of cost will benefit from understanding OpEx tools and their financial impact. Human resources and change management professionals involved in organizational transformation will find the culture change sessions particularly relevant. HSE (health, safety, and environment) leaders can learn how OpEx tools complement safety management systems.

The interactive format means participants should come prepared to share their own challenges and experiences. The Summit is most valuable when participants engage actively with the facilitator and their peers, sharing real-world examples and working through practical applications of the concepts being presented.

The Summit covers a comprehensive toolkit for operational excellence including root cause analysis methodologies, key performance indicator (KPI) selection and measurement, data governance frameworks, and visual management systems. Participants learn how to conduct operational audits, identify and quantify waste, and develop prioritized improvement roadmaps.

Specific techniques covered include value stream mapping to understand current-state processes and design future-state improvements, performance benchmarking against comparable operations in other regions and sectors, and structured problem-solving approaches that ensure issues are resolved at their root cause rather than repeatedly managed at the symptom level.

The closing panel discussion on leaning the organization provides practical guidance on how to sequence improvement initiatives, build momentum through quick wins, and sustain a continuous improvement culture over time. Participants also receive frameworks for communicating OpEx initiatives to their organizations in ways that generate engagement and reduce resistance to change.