Aker BP

Who is Aker BP? 

Aker BP is a company engaged in exploration, field development and production of oil and gas on the Norwegian continental shelf. In terms of production, the company is one of the largest independent oil companies in Europe.

The company operates six field centres: Alvheim, Edvard Grieg, Ivar Aasen, Skarv, Ula and Valhall, and is a partner in the Johan Sverdrup field. 

The challenge

Before 1998, BP Norge (one of the companies that later merged into Aker BP) produced licensing round applications using Word. Several problems were caused by this approach, including time-consuming setbacks when placing diagrams and charts, both key components for optimum readability.

When the documents reached a certain megabyte size, the program crashed, the files were corrupted, frustration set in, and delays threatened deadlines.

One of the biggest challenges for the team was that only one person could work on one document at a time. To work around this problem, the writers divided the Word document into sections. As a result, version control and formatting issues multiplied, resulting in more work serializing the document back together and re-formatting for production and submission.

Aker BP's Office Administrator, Henrik Meinich-Bache, explains:

“Everyone who worked on the licensing round applications spent far too much time formatting and modifying in Word. The licensing round coordinator at the time decided enough was enough after yet another frustrating application was submitted.”

It was around 2000 when key BP Norge stakeholders teamed up with a few bright minds, and they started developing the first version of XaitPorter. It was launched in 2002 (called 'Publish-As-You-Go').

Over the next few years, BP Norge and Xait collaborated closely to develop XaitPorter into what Meinich-Bache describes as “an amazing collaboration tool that is the standard solution for the Norwegian oil industry today, as well as many other enterprises worldwide”.

In 2016, Det Norske and BP Norge merged. Aker BP ASA became the new name of the company.

Read the full customer story below to discover how XaitPorter helped Aker BP overcome these challenges and deliver professional-looking PDO documents faster, easier, and with consistent formatting.