Value creation through collaborative operating environments

Abstract

The aim of this thesis was to identify drivers of value creation in collaborative operating environments with emphasis on the business relation between operator and service providers, through 1) learning from literature and lessons learned form various industries, 2) identify improvement potentials in the business relationship between operator and service companies in an existing collaborative operating environment for drilling projects through a case study, and 3) recommend solutions to capitalize on these potentials. Chapter 2 presents a review of important elements that drives value creation in collaborative operating environments: inter-organizational relationships, management of distributed knowledge, collaborative decision support, and integrated work practices. Chapter 3 contains lessons learned from various industries including space and aeronautical, military, oil and gas, and automotive. In Chapter 4, results from the case study are presented together with identified improvement potentials. Recommended solutions to realize these improvement potentials are presented in Chapter 5. The literature review and case study has shown that knowledge integration in virtual teams and collaborative decision support tools can make large contributions to future value creation. It was also discovered through the case study that one of the drivers of performance in these drilling projects was the level of trust between service companies, and between service companies and operator. Another interesting observation was that even though most service companies were competitors, they collaborated in problem solving as partners. Maybe one can say that today, service companies compete on having the best possible product and service solution. Whilst in the future, softer characteristics are valued more; like trust, partnership history, quality, complementary capabilities, common values and goals, etc. The level of implementation was also looked upon, and according to OLF’s model the collaborative operating environments studied is moving towards generation 2, and according to Vindasius’ model is moving towards a transformational collaborative environments.