Shipping Coordination Tool for UK Oil Terminal

During 2023, Accord was tasked with replacing an aging in-house developed application for managing shipping coordination activities for a UK oil terminal.

The objectives for the new application encompassed:

• Capturing forecasted and actualised production data for fields exporting products to the terminal via pipelines.

• Supporting the scheduling of cargo liftings from the terminal, which includes the creation of cargo parcels and the issuance of lifting instruction documentation to the terminal operator.

• Continuously recalculating forecasted stock levels at the terminal based on the most recent forecast or actual production data received.

• Issuing entitlement reports and lifting program details to all parties entitled to lift products from the terminal.

• Providing summary reports of performance data relevant to shipping coordination.

Responsibility for shipping operations at the terminal is shared between different operators. EnergySys supports easy access to the application by all parties. The role-based security and the ability to set up multiple applications within a single instance ensured that data and functional access could be tightly controlled.

Over the course of its existence, the legacy application accumulated numerous workarounds and step-outs. These were necessitated by both technical and business considerations due to the outdated platform upon which the application was constructed. New requirements were bolted on to the application rather than being fully integrated. In the project, considerable effort was dedicated to carefully redesigning the core business principles for the replacement application, prioritising a comprehensive approach over an exact replication of the legacy system's functionality.

At the same time, for user familiarity and ease of use, a degree of commonality was retained, where appropriate, with the legacy systems. This largely influenced the design of reporting and ‘what-if’ tools that were developed as part of the new application.

A critical feature of the system involved enabling users to swiftly conduct what-if scenarios to assess the impacts of any changes on future stock levels. For instance, users could assess the sufficiency of stock for a vessel arriving on a particular date if a specific field were to go offline. 

Calculation logs within the application were designed to offer workbooks allowing users to effortlessly work with data sets for analysis, providing immediate feedback on impacts. Conditional highlighting and sawtooth charts were utilised to visualise any significant issues.