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The Seismic value chain—providing a new business concept for the seismic industry

Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Corresponding author: innovationmanagement@tbm.tudelft.nl

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

The increased complexity of workflows in the E&P sector is caused by the many "horizontal" interactions that must be included nowadays. Problems cannot just be subdivided into disciplinary subproblems, followed by an independent solution process for each of these subproblems. We now know that such a segmented business approach easily leads to the wrong formulation of the involved subproblems and, above all, the sum of suboptimized solutions seldom leads to the best end result. Today, fragmented workflows caused by disciplinary segmentation are the biggest obstacle to progress.

In highly competitive industrial sectors such as the micro-electronic industry, innovation has not only created new technology but it has also led to new concepts on organizing multidisciplinary business processes in a value chain. In these business processes, clear targets are set at the end of the value chain and projects are designed for each target by extrapolating back into the value chain (decomposition), fostering strong disciplinary interdependencies and ignoring traditional vertical boundaries in the organization. In this way, members of project teams are carefully chosen with the appropriate knowledge and skills. So the key question is not "who is available" but "who is needed," leading to new strategic alliances between companies, contractors and universities. In such a postindustrial organization, project teams make use of a shared model and they function in an integrated network that is focused towards the preset targets. We will see that the concept of moving backward (decomposition) and forward (integration) through the value chain is creating focus and synergy.

	Need for conceptual models

 
In multidisciplinary processes, communication is a critical success factor. Each discipline, however, has developed its own internal jargon, making interdisciplinary communication very hard. In addition, each discipline has its own set of specific methods and tools that require specialized skills. It is clear that fruitful interaction will not take . . . [Full Text of this Article]