Process Mapping Analysis to Improve Scheduling Strategy for Exploration Well Drilling Investment in Proposal Phase

: The delay of accomplishing business process milestones in Exploration Function was an impact of organizational transformation that includes re-grouping of working area and manpower of multiple subsidiary entities into one region. Only two wells managed to be drilled out of six targeted wells. The bottleneck issue lies in the proposal phase of the exploration well drilling investment. Report documents, interviews, and focus group discussion are collected as data for this research. The root causes were found in several stages along proposal phase and coming from process, people, and data aspect. The qualitative analysis of this research applied process mapping analysis to understand the dependency of each task, and value-added - non-value-added activity analysis to define the importance of each task. The result is corrective actions proposed to cut time duration through several treatments towards specific processes. Sequentially, the quantitative analysis of this research applied that new process mapping and use the time of events on the following execution phase as the time limit to estimate the new time duration for each task. The managerial implication of this research is the generation of a metric for project scheduling.


INTRODUCTION
As a net importing country, Indonesia still needs oil and gas energy in the energy transition era.For this reason, SKK Migas is expecting to achieve the production target of 1 million BOPD and 12 BSCFD by 2030.Depletion of reserve and lack of new reserve discoveries are still the issues in the upstream sector of oil and gas industry in Indonesia. 1 The productivity of oil could not cover the rate of consumption that has been increasing from 1,585 MBOPD in 2020 to 1,585 MBOPD in 2022. 2 As one of the core functions in an oil and gas company, Exploration Function has a major role in keeping the business alive and being responsible for the discovery and addition of oil and gas resources.To discover oil and gas, Exploration Function activities are generally to obtain subsurface information from Geology and Geophysics (G&G) data acquisitions.G&G data can be acquired from geophysical seismic surveys, geological field surveys and studies, and exploration well drilling.Exploration well drilling could provide subsurface well data that will be very informative after being analyzed in laboratories for various kinds of deeper analysis.
During the transitional phase from work from office to work from home lifestyle in 2021, top management of PT PETA had taken this opportunity to establish re-organization known as the establishment of six sub-holdings.The organizational transformation has created a re-grouping of working area.One region could consist of operating working area and manpower that comes from several different subsidiary entities.The multi-interpretations of how business process should be followed during this transformation transition has impacted in the delay of accomplishing milestones along the business process for Exploration Function.In 2022, the performance of exploration well drilling was only 2 wells out of 6 targeted wells.This phenomenon might be affected by the performance of processes prior to the exploration well drilling.Well drilling is an activity located in the execution phase of an exploration well drilling investment.Before it reaches the execution phase, an investment must undergo budgeting session, pre-operation session, and the proposal phase.The bottleneck could be from any of those prior phases.The poor performance during the proposal phase is reflected in the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) productivity that happens during that phase.The KPI items applied during the proposal phase are such as New Prospect Generation (NPR) and Technically Approved Prospect (TAP).NPR and TAP are the earliest two KPI items along the business process of Exploration Function.This could affect the later stages from the whole business process.Another stage in the proposal phase is called Final Investment Decision Based on those facts, this research will investigate the reasons behind the lack of NPR and TAP KPI items performance compared to plan, the impacts of not having any targets for FID approval towards the timeline of the following phase, the issues and insufficiencies that are faced when finishing tasks from the start until gaining FID approval, how process analysis could assess the relationship between one stage and another within the proposal phase, and how could a new project scheduling strategy be created and if possible, could shorten the length of proposal phase duration.

LITERATURE REVIEW Internal Business Process
To carry out a consistent process, the company has a guideline book for investment management in accordance with the applicable regulations.Based on the book, investment is the usage of resources to maintain and increase the value of the company.Investment management for Exploration Function is divided into two main phases, namely proposal phase and execution phase.The proposal phase is the delivery and submission of investment proposal until approval of FID is granted.After the proposal phase, a project goes to setting budget allocation meetings called Rencana Kerja dan Anggaran Perusahaan (RKAP) and Work Program & Budgeting (WP&B).Then it goes to the execution of the project itself, and up to project closing.Specifically for the proposal phase, the business procedures of exploration well drilling investment proposal consist of several stages.Funneling  An assessment session to discuss the calculation of possibility of success and of resources of the proposed prospect from technical point of view  The assessor is a team of fellow geoscientists from subholding  Approval is given in the form of signed Minutes of Meetings  The output is generation of TAP using MMBOE as quantity unit  TAP and it is one of the KPI items for Exploration Function 2.
TECOP  Parameters used for evaluation of exploration portfolio.Abbreviation of Technical, Economics, Commerciality, Operations, and Political 3.

Operationa l Challenge Session
 An assessment session to ensure the quality of a proposed investment from all five TECOP aspects  The asessor is a team of multiple functions from the subholding  Approval is given in the form of signed Minutes of Meeting 4.
FS  FS is a document that encompasses complete description of investment opportunity from general, technical and operational, law and compliance, human capital, commerciality, health safety security environment (HSSE), financial, and project economics aspects  Submission of FS is sent to subholding or holding company, along with cover letter and form that had been signed by Director Region D  FS submission is one of the KPI item with percentage of progress in writing the FS document and number of document as quantity unit 5 Gate Review  An assessment session involving multiple functions to ensure the quality of a proposed investment from all aspects within the FS  The assessor is a team from subholding or holding company depending on the threshold of capital expenditure of the project  Approval is given in the form of signed Minutes of Meeting

Project Schedule Management
The PMBOK Guide groups divide processes into ten categories based on knowledge areas, one of them is project schedule management.Project schedule management includes the process required to manage the timely completion of a project. 4A Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart that can be used to display the start date and duration of each task that makes up a project.Project scheduling serves several purposes, such as identifying precedence relationships among activities, encouraging the setting of realistic time for each activity, and making better use of resources by identifying critical bottlenecks in the project. 5

Process Mapping Analysis
Process mapping analysis is to ensure that a specific process is clearly defined.Metric is a tool to define a reliable means of measuring the process that is relative to the project deliverables. 6There are some cases of having multiple processes within the series of processes or lack of a well-defined process.This phenomenon is often revealed after interviewing users who do the process.In this regard, the outcome of process analysis is closely linked to revealing process baseline.

Business Process Modeling Notation
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a graphical notation that describes the logic of the steps in a business process and specifically designed to coordinate the sequence of processes that flow between actors in a related set of activities.
Terms or notations used in BPMN are such as: 1. Participant: In a business process, several actors or roles or participants are involved.To describe different actors, diversifications of lane are used.2. Event: There are two types of events i.e., Start Event (symbolized with non-bold circle) to mark the start of the business process and End Event (symbolized by bold circle) to mark that the business process flow has stopped or finished.3. Gateway: The branching in a business process flow that determines which path will be taken and why.There are exclusive gateway, inclusive gateway, and parallel gateway.The diamonds shape symbolized decision task.

Value-Added and Non-Value-Added Activity Analysis
How effective a process is in creating value could show the excellence of the processes.Effectiveness itself is defined as a process that encompasses quality, price, delivery, timeliness, and everything else goes into perceived value.Having a process focus is to classify whether an activity is relating to the creation of the final value. 6Thus, a process can be either value-added (VA), non-valueadded (NVA), or essential-non-value-added (ENVA) if an NVA activity is still needed in order to comply with the necessity.

RESEARCH METHOD
For this research, primary data is taken directly from the users in the company through interviews and focus group discussion, meanwhile secondary data are the data that have been interpreted such as in the form of report documents.The research is consisting of both qualitative and quantitative research with sequential analysis.To be a real case example that shows how business process is perceived by users from several different subsidiary entities Why was the actual performance of NPR and TAP had been lacking compared to the plan?; What are the impacts of not having any targets for FID approval towards the timeline of the following phase?

2.
Could you mention the source and step-by-step of carrying out the proposal phase in your routine work?
To capture the undetected process of how users get data for starting the first step in the series of processes 3.
What are the issues and insufficiencies that you are still facing throughout proposal phase?
To find the root cause of problems; To seek where improvement or acceleration can take place What are the issues and insufficiencies that are faced when finishing tasks and completing stages in the proposal phase, from the start until gaining FID approval?

4.
Which step during the proposal phase took the longest to finish and why?
To evaluate which steps are critical path, could be executed in parallel, or could be eliminated 5.
What improvements could be done to accelerate the processes in proposal phase?
To gather step by step practical alternative solutions; To generate both quantitative and qualitative value creation How could process mapping analysis assess the relationship between one stage and another within the proposal phase?What are the step-by-step actions plan for the implementation of the new metric scheduling?(For the business solution, and also for the cutting time initiative action plans) To get support for the implementation of business solutions

3.
Who is in charge, how much budget, and what resources can be utilized to implement those improvements?

RESULTS
The qualitative data analysis reveals the actual breakdown list of tasks for each stage including the ones that were not included in the organization business process guideline book.Other stages in proposal stage that were not captured are Data Preparation, Subsurface Evaluation, Pre-Funneling, Technical Discussion Session, and Operation Discussion Session.Within the stages, there are also tasks that were not captured such as meeting arrangement, presentation preparation, follow-up evaluations, and approval routing.The precedence relationships among tasks including dependency are mapped out using a flowchart.Based on the data reported by users, there are some findings on possible root causes of problems that arise during the proposal phase as summarized on the fishbone diagram below.The ideal dependency of each task to its precedent task can be determined by measuring the minimum percentage of progress of each task to proceed to the next task.The value of activity is determined by the verb of activity and output of the activity.The quantitative analysis calculates the length of time for each activity in the current project schedule chart from the average length of time taken according to several exploration projects actualization.The actual total duration of the proposal phase is around 24 months.In relation to project scheduling, some tasks with low dependency are to be treated with solutions that enable tasks to run simultaneously, meanwhile tasks with high dependency become the critical path.NVA tasks are to be eliminated or at least reduced in term of time consumption through several cutting time duration initiatives.The new process mapping metric that was resulted from the qualitative analysis will be drawn into a new flowchart.The expected time duration for each task in the proposal phase after the action plans are then calculated to generate a metric for the improved project scheduling.Before the cutting time duration initiatives, the proposal phase ends in week 1 of month 24 or around two years.After the improvements, the proposal phase is estimated to end in week 2 of month 12 or around one year.It can be interpreted that the total amount is reduced by one year.

DISCUSSION
The RKAP phase often starts in May and being finalized in July.RKAP is followed by WP&B for Exploration Function that often starts in August and being finalized in November.Then, the projects can proceed to execution phase to start with permit licensing, procurement, site preparation, and so on.The well drilling is to be drilled the next year.Therefore, the proposal phase should have finished with the approval of FID by April.

CONCLUSION
The bottleneck issue lies in the proposal phase of exploration well drilling investment that is reflected from the well drilling execution realization and other activities in proposal phase as well such as Pre-Funneling stage and Funneling stage, and the last stage which is FID Approval that has no target.Pre-Funneling stage is critical for NPR and Funneling stage is critical for TAP, both in resource quantity unit and being scored per quarterly.Meanwhile the FID Approval stage has no target, resulting in unmeasurable timeline to proceed to execution phase.
The root causes of this issue are challenge session follow-ups that re-occurred too often and for too long, lack of coordination, longer time to gather data, tough FID approval for proposals with high uncertainty subsurface evaluation, difficulties to finish evaluations, and longer time for waiting on senior advisors to consult about the evaluation.The corrective actions based on the qualitative analysis is from making a process mapping to show the dependency of each task, also value-added and non-value-added analysis to define the importance of each task along the proposal phase.
The result of the qualitative analysis is that there are tasks that can be eliminated by changing the process mechanism, and there are tasks that can be executed in parallel through adding executor of the process and standardizing scope of the process.The corrective actions based on the quantitative analysis is from positive deviation of time duration and setting the time limit benchmarking on budget allocation event RKAP and WP&B and execution year of well drilling.The result of the quantitative analysis is that the proposal phase should start no later than May, so that FID Approval could be obtained by May the next year.Then proceed to RKAP that starts on May and WP&B that starts from August.The fastest a well drilling can be executed is in the following year of FID approval or two years after starting the proposal phase.
Approval.FID Approval is the last stage of the proposal phase, yet neither target nor KPI had been set by the Exploration Function for this final stage.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Current Project Schedule Realization to budgeting session (RKAP & WP&B) and Execution Phase (outside of research scope) of the RKAP and WP&B that year; one year before the expected year of well drilling execution -FID Approval May of the year of RKAP and WP&B; one year before the expected year of well drilling execution The current condition with no target for FID approval is changed with the establishment of target of getting FID approval in May at the latest Execution Phase May-July is internal RKAP discussion and agreement for the following year -August is the external WP&B discussion and agreement for the following year -Stages in the execution phase -

Table 1 .
Activity Description for Stages in Proposal Phase for Exploration Function

Table 2 .
Interview Questions Analysis No.

Table 3 .
Focus Group Discussion Topics Analysis

Table 5 .
Potential Tasks that could be Treated with Improvement The type of treatments above is translated into action plans in accordance with its root cause previously elaborated in the fishbone diagram and the positive impacts that come out of it so it can be implemented for generating the new process mapping.

Table 6 .
Proposed Improvements to Cut Time Duration

Table 7 .
New Project Schedule Metric as Business Solution