Unlocking 10,000 additional barrels per day through Integrated Activity Planning

Starting point

The operator was producing roughly 35,000 bopd across four remote fields. Installed capacity suggested the system could sustain at least 45,000 bopd, but recurring downtime, clashing shutdowns, and short-notice “break-in” work meant that potential was rarely realized.

Each function planned work in its own silo. Drilling and well intervention, maintenance, projects, subsurface, HSE, and logistics all kept separate spreadsheets and calendars. Contractors and heavy equipment were booked independently, and bed space at camps was reserved “just in case.” Planned activities repeatedly overrode each other, turning routine work into unplanned outages and production deferment.

There was no single integrated plan, no consistent rule for what work could enter the schedule, and no disciplined process for changing it once published. Leadership could see volatility and lost barrels in the production reports, but not which planning failures and clashes were driving them.

The Chief Operating Officer set a clear challenge: unlock an additional 10,000 barrels per day by cutting avoidable downtime and bringing discipline to how work was planned, sequenced, and executed across the fields.

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Approach

For this work, the COO hired a consulting team that included Bhuvan Maingi, now at Strathen Group, to design and guide the strategy. The mandate was to design and embed an Integrated Activity Planning (IAP) model that would align all functions to a single plan and provide the governance needed to support higher, more stable production.

The work started with a baseline of planning performance and mapping how each function built plans, how work entered and exited the schedule, and how often activities were deferred or cancelled. Schedule compliance sat at roughly 40 percent, with frequent break-ins and conflicts over shared resources such as cranes, nitrogen units, and specialist crews.

From there, the team designed a simple but rigorous 90/30/7 planning rhythm:
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• 90-day Functional Activity Plans (FAP)
  ‍Each function had to build a 90-day FAP as its single system of record. To enter the plan, activities were required to meet stage-gate criteria on scope, owner, dates, materials and long-leads, contractor and equipment bookings, production impact and deferment value, POB and bed needs, risks, and key interdependencies.
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• Integrated Activity Planner and 90-day Plans (IAP)
  ‍A new Integrated Activity Planner role was created to consolidate all FAPs into one 90-day Integrated Activity Plan. In integration meetings, the planner and function leads identified and resolved schedule overlaps, resource conflicts, production-impact clashes, and bed constraints until a single feasible plan was agreed.
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• Firm 30-day window and weekly plans
  ‍Once published, the first 30 days of the IAP were treated as firm. Any change required leadership approval with a reason code, turning break-ins from a habit into an exception. Weekly plans were then derived from the firm 30-day window and used by sites for execution and daily briefings.
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To make discipline visible, a Compliance Scorecard was designed that tracked planned versus executed activities, cancellations, break-ins, and non-compliance by function and reason. This gave leaders a clear monthly view of where the plan was breaking and why.

The IAP model was integrated with other operational levers. Bed planning rules were aligned to the IAP so accommodation and logistics matched the work plan. Production forecasts were tied into the 90-day view so the impact of deferments on throughput was visible ahead of time, not just after month-end.

Finally, IAP workshops for more than 50 leaders, planners, and supervisors were delivered. They clarified roles via RACIs, walked through the new stage-gate standards, and simulated integration meetings so people could practice challenging work that was not ready to enter the plan.

Instead of chasing more projects and equipment, leadership focused on planning and executing the work they already did in an integrated way, every cycle.

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Outcome

The IAP program gave the operator a practical path to lift stable production from about 35,000 to 45,000 barrels per day using the infrastructure it already had. By aligning maintenance, wells, projects, and logistics into a single plan and locking the near-term window, the operator reduced avoidable downtime and protected production windows.

In the first full cycle after training and score carding, schedule compliance improved from roughly 40 percent to 67 percent, the best performance recorded to date. As compliance rose, unplanned overlaps, short-notice break-ins, and unnecessary shutdowns fell. Shared resources were used more efficiently, and critical production periods were less likely to be disrupted by last-minute changes.

For leadership, the combination of the Compliance Scorecard and the 90/30/7 cadence created a new operating rhythm. Monthly reviews focused on why work did not execute as planned, which functions were driving non-compliance, and what needed to change in planning discipline or stage-gate rigor. Production deferment became something that could be managed proactively, not just explained after the fact.

Operationally, the benefits extended beyond throughput. Coordinated POB and bed planning gave accurate rosters for each site, improving safety drills and emergency readiness. Shutdown and turnaround planning became easier, since maintenance and projects were working from the same integrated view of the next 90 days.

For the COO and asset teams, the real shift was cultural as much as technical. Integrated Activity Planning turned the schedule from a loose collection of functional intentions into a single, owned commitment for the field. As adherence to the model strengthened, the operator moved closer to capturing the additional 10,000 barrels per day that had long been latent in its North Oman assets.

For upstream leaders, the lesson was that meaningful production growth does not always require new infrastructure; it requires an integrated plan, firm near-term commitments, and the discipline to run them cycle after cycle.

This work continues to guide how Strathen Group thinks about integrated planning, using firm planning windows, stage gates, and compliance scorecards to unlock production from existing assets rather than defaulting to new infrastructure.