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Former Member
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SAP Canada’s Emerging Technologies co-innovation development team has enabled Vantage Drilling to have uninterrupted access to their SAP transactions, even in the most remote locations.

Vantage Drilling, an international offshore drilling contractor, operates and manages fleets of modern and high specification drilling rigs.  Due to the remote nature of their operations, they need their business to run continuously and efficiently, anywhere, anytime.  Their globally deployed drilling rigs and ships experience high latency and interruptible satellite communications, causing work delays and blocking their ability to complete mission critical processes. Unplanned system downtime impacts workflow and increases operational costs. Network instability causes end-user frustration and an overall poor user experience.

Our highly creative development team (pictured above) at Waterloo Labs Canada is focused on delivering leading-edge co-innovation solutions with customers like Vantage. To address Vantage’s challenges, we used Design Thinking to gain empathy and truly understand the issues the end-users were experiencing. We worked collaboratively in our apphaus space for 3-week sprints to develop and implement a sustainable solution, which allowed them to have SAP functionality, wherever and whenever they need it. It is always-available, provides LAN-based speed, and has an easy to use interface.

The always-available solution was developed using SAP SQL Anywhere and SAP MobiLink (both also developed at the Waterloo Lab) to synch between the remote site and headquarters.

We extended essential SAP transactions in the areas of plant maintenance, inventory management, and materials management. The end-users at the remote location interact with the local database through a custom application built with SAP UI5. This in turn delivers a highly responsive and desirable user experience.

This co-innovation has yielded the following positive results:

  • Training budget has decreased by $260K per Rig
  • User adoption and proficiency/productivity was almost immediate (hours)
  • Annual cost for managing the solution has decreased by $250K per year

Our vision is to leverage this architecture to extend any SAP transaction to be always-available in an uninterrupted fashion. In addition to interest from the Oil and Gas industry, there are interested customers in other verticals such as Transportation, Mining & Forestry, Aerospace & Defense, and Retail.

The SAP Emerging Technologies team is proud to be a part of this success and is excited to engage with customers and partners interested in this always-available solution and other collaborations.

This repeatable solution is now available. For more information on the solution please email me at joanna.ritchie@sap.com.

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