Hello, and welcome to today's session at the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for this very important event, the award for best partner transformation, best energy solution. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE, and I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pari Veda Solutions, and Doug Friedman, Project Engineering Manager at Exxon Mobile Global Projects. Welcome to the program, so glad to have you here. Glad to be here, thank you. Yes, thanks for having us. Terrific. Well, let's start with you, Doug. Can you give us a brief overview of your subsidiary for some of our audience that may not be familiar with it? And also, how are you using AWS now to transform collaboration on major capital projects? Certainly, and thank you. So as many will know, Exxon Mobile is a sort of a global energy provider around the world operating on six out of the seven continents. Global projects, which is the specific subsidiary where I work, we are responsible for delivery of major capital projects to the various business units around the world. So we have the opportunity to, once approved by the business unit, to deliver on the engineering procurement and construction activities associated with building a new facility, if you will. And that ranges across oil and gas production, refining, and chemical activities. Yeah, terrific. And I'd love to shift now to Alan. Could you give us an insight on DPH and your collaboration with Exxon Mobile? That would be terrific. Happy to. We first got involved with Digital Project Home after Doug had reached out to AWS, seeking ways to innovate how major capital projects look at collaboration in the engineering procurement and construction value chain. And we were brought in as an AWS from your partner to help design and uplift a new way to facilitate that collaboration between Exxon Mobile and its EPC companies. And we got involved early on in the design phase where we were in the room together, putting up wire frames on the walls, walking through the processes, trying to figure out how do we streamline a process that had quite a bit of toil in it from both a combination of mixed systems to manual processes. And that's where we got involved to really help to sketch out some of that early vision from Doug. Perfect. Now, Doug, how is Digital Project Home facilitating collaboration with your contractors? Well, as folks would recognize, some of these projects are quite large, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, very extensive in terms of the number of people on the owner operator side, as well as the various professional contracting firms that help us to succeed at building out these projects and the decisions, the interactions, the way that we work with one another involves hundreds of millions of hours in some cases and many, many decisions. What we were looking for is to try to understand how some of those formal interactions where questions are asked and answered, and we need a record of the question that was asked and answered for contractual purposes and for the history. When documents are submitted and need to be reviewed and returned, some of those formal interactions historically had been through platforms and methodologies that were really quite, to use the phrase Allen just did, quite toilsome, right? And what we were looking to do was to kind of come into the modern world and use some of the digital tools, methods and programming that are available to help automate in some cases, to help smooth the actual transfer of information and to bring information to the surface, right? As practitioners on a project, how do you have information available to you at your fingertips so that you can have better information that allows you to make better decisions and return your answers not only more quickly with less hours involved in getting to that answer, but also a better answer with a higher confidence that we've answered it the way we need to and we don't have to revisit later. Now terrific, well, Allen can you now describe some of the benefits of this cloud-native serverless architecture? Absolutely. If you remember back what Doug was saying earlier, ExxonMobil operates on six to seven continents around the world. So one of the first things we wanted to do is make sure that we were designing for a solution that could meet any end user no matter where they were in the world, whether it was Africa, North America, Australia, Asia, it didn't matter. So we wanted to choose a cloud infrastructure like AWS that had an amazing ability to serve global customers around the world. And more specifically, we knew it was really important to get to a value-adding solution as quickly as possible. So by leveraging serverless technology, we got to spend most of our time building the technology that was gonna be adding value because AWS's infrastructure had already solved many of just the pipework style issues at hand. So AWS really gave us an accelerated platform to really start diving into the innovative side of improving collaboration between ExxonMobil and their engineering procurement and construction vendors.  I'd love to hear how is it helping ExxonMobil to build with greater agility and at lower costs? There are a couple of things that come to mind with me. First, we led very early on with a modular-based design. We knew there were gonna be multiple use cases that we had to satisfy. And every major capital project does follow rigorous global processes, but often has to adapt them to the environment at hand to what they're particularly constructing things of that nature. So we wanted to build a solution that would adapt them quickly so they're not constantly having to go back and build new customizations, new workflows that were specific to one entity or project versus another. So just by making it modular and flexible, we were able to already start to save costs. Additionally, because we're moving into the cloud, we completely take out a lot of the infrastructure maintenance costs that go with that. And that's really where the AWS infrastructure and the cloud-based solution really started to help save money as we streamlined the solution. Yeah, well, speaking of flexibility, Doug, why is it so important for your business? So as Alan pointed out, Natalie, we work all over the world with different partners, different EPC contractors. And so we needed the flexibility to be able to use this tool in locations all around the world. In many cases, the same project has people located around the world. So we had to have that speed and access. We also had to have the flexibility to be able to adjust to specific requirements, perhaps, of unique relationships between us, our co-ventry partners, the countries that host us and so forth. But in addition to that, I'll add to Alan's comment, by structuring it the way Parvada did, or Parvada, sorry. What we ended up with is sort of foundational building blocks that allowed us then to extend in future to additional interactions that we might have with our contractors. So we built out the first couple, and those are available to us today, technical queries and document reviews, but we knew and anticipate that we'll continue to have additional workflows, if you will, additional interactions with our partners that we will want to automate and strengthen in the same way. And so having the flexibility of this building block architecture that Parvada put together allows us to anticipate that in future, we can build that out to additional workflows. Terrific. Well, now shifting gears, I'd love to hear from Alan a bit here, or actually Doug, excuse me, how do you actually find the system? Do you find that it is intuitive or do you have to train people really meticulously on this kind of platform? Well, let's design from the beginning to be a very user-friendly, the user experience element of the design work, Parvada brought that in from the very beginning. And in fact, from our perspective, was one of the key talents that they brought to the design, right? So we had a problem that we were trying to solve, a platform that we wanted it to work on, but that user interaction, that user experience was so important from the very beginning, and is quite frankly an area where I lacked the experience to have been able to influence it very much. But the Parvada team and the AWS team as they work together with us, built-in user experience from the very beginning, that doesn't mean that we don't have to still give some folks a little bit of training to get used to it, but it was designed from the beginning to be quite an intuitive approach so folks could do their work. We really were after, from my view, from the very beginning, low in toil, rich in information, those were the two things we were trying to accomplish with the entire platform. Yeah, and if either one of you wanna jump in here, obviously you're dealing with a lot of information, what is the data storage like? It's surprising not as much as you might think. We designed for optimized data storage from the beginning. We really wanted to make sure we only stored the data that we needed, but also capture as much of it as possible so that we could surface information. That was a goal for us from the beginning was to not only capture the information that was happening between the collaboration, but design it in a way that we could use technologies like AL and AI and machine learning languages capabilities to surface data out. So from a data storage standpoint, a lot of the data was stored outside of AWS. We also have fair amount stored inside of AWS and because of that footprint, we were able to keep costs quite low. Perfect. Well, Alan, again, staying with you, really curious how is the system addressing the pain points of ExxonMobil global projects specifically? One of the main goals from the beginning, like Doug was saying, is to reduce the toil. And a lot of toil came from the process of an EPC company needing to submit a document over to ExxonMobil and then getting it distributed to the right teams to provide that feedback or perhaps in reverse where ExxonMobil needed to send a document over to one of their EPC companies to get feedback as well. That oftentimes involved multiple people on both sides of that equation. It involved multiple systems that had to be accessed and leveraged to not only capture and transfer the document, provide tools for doing markup and providing comments. Digital Project Home unified that entire experience so that the engineers on both sides of the document collaboration process could go into one system and perform all their functions. We automated the routing. We gave them an in-tool PDF markup capability so they could just load the document straight into their browser, start doing their work, add their comments, save and submit and the system would facilitate all of that. So we took out multiple hops in the process and reduced the amount of time people had to spend doing tasks that weren't necessarily a value add. And I'll add to that. Natalie, is it okay? I'll add to that. Oh, please do. You know, both on the EPC contractor side as well as the owner side, we have small teams of what we call document controllers, right? Because we handle so many documents. It's quite a labor intensive or manual type approach but it didn't need to be. And the DPH approach and the way that it was built out, it's still not completely eliminated all of the intervention of document controllers but it reduces the burden and even the team size necessary to maneuver those documents back and forth. We were, we in our engagements with our contractors have a contractual obligation to return our comments within a specified period of time. And we were losing 10 to 20% of that time just in the document management side of getting it from the right person to the right person and back. And so when schedules are tight, we have a lot to do losing 20% of our contractual time to get a document returned with comments. That was a bit painful for us. So eliminating that or at least drastically reducing it was a big win among others. Yeah. Well, staying with you Doug, what do you see as the major benefits of creating this platform on AWS? Really, to me, it comes down to better decisions in underpinned by better information at hand to those who are having to review, answer questions, review documents, better information at hand that allows us then to have the information that's required to get to a good answer and provide that back, whether it's from the contractor to us or the other way around on either side, surfacing information, right? Because otherwise a practitioner is going off to find an industry standard, going back to find out if we already had a query on that same document. See what we said last time or how that question was different from this question. There was a lot of hunting and pecking, so to speak, to find out what information was allied to the question or allied to the document. And what we were really looking for was a solution that would bring that information up, give us live links, allow us to jump across to that information straight away, not only have the information, but also be able to access it quite quickly. Terrific, and Alan now shifting gears over to you. I'm really curious how this system will improve efficiencies for MCPs for the years to come. As Doug mentioned, we designed this system from the beginning to be extendable, to be modular. Think of like Lego blocks, where the Legos themselves represent functionality that we know can serve purposes in multiple different workflows. So as ExxonMobil continues to develop this platform in partnership with feedback from their engineering procurement and construction companies, they're gonna be able to quickly build new workflows, leveraging component-based design that we did from day one. So the efficiencies gonna come as they are able to add new capabilities to the platform very quickly and using modern technology to ensure that it's relevant and capable in serving the business's needs. Terrific, now Doug, as this project scales up, what are some of the other benefits which you expect can be realized? Well, Natalie, we're looking to extend it to more projects, as is often the case with things like this. We trial it in a few places to build it out, gain the experience. We're looking to extend it to additional users, but we're also looking to do just what Alan was just mentioning there. Folks involved in major projects are familiar with such things as management of change, deviations, issues management, right? And so there are a handful of interactions that happen between parties and something like this. And so while we've built out two of the workflows as a starting place, and while we've deployed this tool, if you will, to a few of our projects, our vision is that we would be able to extend the number of users and be able to build out additional important interactions or workflows that we have so that the digital project home becomes a place that holds even more of a practitioner's daily work activities. Terrific. And if either one of you would like to jump in here and provide just like a quick snapshot of how much manpower, time, and costs are saved as a result of using this type of platform. Well, on our side, Alan, I'll jump in here. We anticipate on a large project, we will transact over thousands of documents. Now, some of them get more review and some of them get less review, but there are thousands of documents that are developed in terms of engineering, procurement, and construction type activities. And to the extent that we can save a small amount of time and get better answers on each one, that really adds up quickly when you consider the number of hours expended in that overall effort. So we're talking thousands upon thousands of hours that we believe can be reduced. And what that translates to, not only the ability to execute a project with a smaller team, but we are confident with better information in hand will make better decisions. Well, thank you both for your insights. Loved having you on this program. That was Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pari Beta Solutions and Doug Friedman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. That's all for this session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. And I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching.


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