May 16, 2005

In the vast Athabasca Tar Sands Deposit in Alberta sits an impressive storage of synthetic fuel. This very large deposit is one that could, in theory support the entire world's energy needs for 15 long years.

The company responsible of extracting and processing these valuable tar sands into usable fuel is none other than Syncrude, which is using a B2B portal to support its operations.

Syncrude's operations are on the same massive scale as the mine atop which it sits. The company has 4,000 employees, 2,750 of whom are in the field, and employs some of the world's heaviest machinery (including so-called 360-ton trucks that would be right at home in Dune.

At any given time, then, Syncrude has thousands of field employees and a number of very valuable assets in play. Aligning employees with assets, and providing them the information they need to be more effective in their functions, is a portal from vendor Plumtree.

Plumtree is the delivery mechanism for most information that could impact Syncrude's operations. Databases and a data warehouse aggregate information (ranging from the locations of shovels to the status of those 360-ton trucks) that Plumtree then makes relevant to any employee by function.

"Our objective is for people to get information and go out into the field," explains Darcy Daugela, Web services team leader for Syncrude, offering an example.

"When maintenance technicians log in, they see all the information they need to do their work presented in the portal." That information is both static (e.g. fixing procedures) and dynamic (e.g. daily operating logs) but in any case relevant to what a particular worker needs to know in the field.

Syncrude provides an excellent illustration of how the value of a portal scales according to the total information available to it. Syncrude's databases capture such large amounts of information (within the plant alone, there are 250,000 nodes from which information gets entered into systems of record) that the portal can present just about any kind of information imaginable.

Daugela provides an example relating to the field. "The computer system knows the engine temperature, oil, braking, transmission information," he says.

The granularity of this information is a big help to technicians, who can arm themselves with a lot of knowledge about a specific problem before actually arriving on-site to fix it.

That's just one example of how Syncrude's portal is relevant to supporting field employees, who have the further luxury of an extensive wireless network. But Daugela explains that both the portal and the underlying data warehouse have executive value as well.

Since Syncrude engages in daily costing, the company gets high-level snapshots of performance and operations with very little latency.

This information can be accessed in different ways by different executives. Mid-level managers, for example, could use the portal and data warehouse to look at truck utilization patterns by area over a given timeframe. The CEO, on the other hand, might want to take a higher-level look at production metrics.

The Plumtree-powered portal has the flexibility to pull in all of Syncrude's enterprise information as needed, making the presentation layer handy to every single employee in the company.

Daugela estimates that 70 percent of Syncrude employees use the portal every day, and within any given week that expands to 99 percent of employees. "Whether we're presenting HR information, production information, or presidential announcements, the portal is the first point of access for everybody," Daugela concludes.

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