The American Petroleum Institute, or API, is well known as an organisation defining standards for performance and operation in the global oil and gas industry. Its work is done through a series of committees and sub-committees, populated by volunteers from throughout the industry.
Petroleum Industry Data Exchange (PIDX), one such committee, deals with electronic business standards and processes. The committee has been developing and promoting a single, open-source standard for e-commerce transactions in the oil and gas industry. A recent visit to the region from some of the committee's members was aimed at raising awareness of the xml-based e-business standard.
Starting work in the early 2000s, the committee developed the standard with the help of experts from operating companies, suppliers, software companies and third party trading exchanges. The development process was a collaborative volunteer effort to come up with a standard, owned by API, which anyone could use. The result is open source, non-profit, and free to participate in, download and use. The specification allows different systems to talk to each other and send the kind of data that is unique to the upstream oil and gas business.
"Since we went to the xml-based standard, we've seen it grow globally," said Terry Thomas, chair of the PIDX committee and eContext development manager for Schlumberger. "We wanted to start meeting people around the world and make them aware of the successes we've had with it."
The standard, which covers the entire commercial document scope from order to invoice, is being used in 13 countries. It started in North America and quickly expanded to South America, Africa, and parts of Asia.
"Buyers have told us there are probably 50 major suppliers are now using the PIDX standard," said Dan Collins, senior manager in e-business for Halliburton. "From Halliburton and Schlumberger's point of view, it is the standard we're using for electronic business transactions."
The system has addressed what the committee saw as an inherent problem in the upstream oil and gas industry - the requirement to provide supporting documentation with any transaction. The system's solution is a transaction routing protocol that allows an image of any supporting documents to be packaged with the digital information, so any ERP system is populated with both.
"A lot of the time, what would slow the transaction approval process was waiting for the supporting documentation," said Thomas. "In the past guys would be waiting for documents that are still in the back of a pick-up truck, on site somewhere.
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