McDermott International
Engineering company leads the oil and gas industry’s digital evolution using Hyland's Alfresco platform on AWS.
With offices across the globe and over 100 years in the oil sector, McDermott International is a pillar in the energy industry. As a premier engineering, procurement, construction and installation company, the team prides themselves on leading the way toward the future of the industry. As an established provider of petrochemical, refining, gasification and gas processing technologies, the company's service offerings span the entire value chain from concept to commission.
Recognizing the opportunity for digital transformation
For over a century, McDermott has established its reputation as an innovator, and the company continues to evolve.
"Originally, we procured, constructed and installed the energy product — often a large rig — for customers," said Vagesh Dave, chief information officer at McDermott.
The company's offerings changed after merging with Chicago Bridge and Iron (CB&I).
"We now have end-to-end capabilities and offerings," Dave said. "Together, we've created a unique value proposition for customers. We can establish infrastructure from refineries all the way up to power plants."
Prior to the merger, McDermott was already well on its way to undergoing a company-wide digital transformation. The evolution of service offerings created through the merger set the stage for McDermott to double down on its digital efforts. And while the disruptive nature of digital transformation has the potential to cause the most chaos in companies with long histories deeply rooted in an analog foundation, McDermott had a vision for the company that surpassed industry archetype.
"We take a lot of pride in the technology that we've built, and we had a clear goal from day one as we embarked on a digital transformation journey," Dave said. "To create and deliver innovative solutions for our customers, we looked to combine our specialized talents in-house with cutting-edge technologies offered only by going digital."
We take a lot of pride in the technology that we’ve built, and we had a clear goal from day one as we embarked on a digital transformation journey. To create and deliver innovative solutions for our customers, we looked to combine our specialized talents in-house with cutting-edge technologies offered only by going digital.
— Vagesh Dave, CIO, McDermott International
Partnering with Hyland to build a centralized knowledge base on AWS
The first phase of the company's transformational journey involved harnessing its existing institutional data, which, for a 124-year-old company, proved to be a massive undertaking. Millions of documents were housed around the globe in various forms and conditions, including papers, sketches, graphics and notes in multiple languages.
"One of the products we knew we needed to build was a knowledge platform," Dave said. "It was essential to harness the century-long background we have working on these complex projects to help simplify current-day workforce productivity as our teams look to past information to help build future solutions efficiently and effectively. Within the documentation is particular domain expertise, but it was very segmented."
For this massive undertaking, the company chose to utilize Hyland's Alfresco platform, an Advanced AWS Partner Network (APN) Technology partner, and the benefits of building a knowledge base on AWS quickly became clear. Impressed with Alfresco's ability to deliver a successful pilot on AWS in just four days, McDermott adopted the Alfresco Digital Business Platform to gain new insights and operating efficiencies from decades of documents.
"We wanted to see which cloud provider could provide native integration with Alfresco platform, as well as the latest technologies," Dave said. "We went through an extensive functional and technical evaluation of leading technologies and found AWS to have a robust application stack we believe we can take advantage of for this phase and future phases of our digital transformation."
The Hyland team believes that using AWS was a driving factor for success during the initial engagement.
"The amount of data we were looking to curate and manage for McDermott was astronomical. They were looking to put about 135 million documents into the AWS Cloud from locations around the world," said Ankur Laroia, Alfresco's head of solution strategy for enterprise content management (ECM). "We imported two terabytes of data into AWS, sending it from Dubai to London, and in two hours we were able to capture, scan and index all of the data. That was a powerful demonstration of what was possible on AWS."
Optimizing security and company-wide efficiency
The Alfresco Digital Business Platform is an integral component of McDermott's new enterprise architecture. The platform was selected to provide unified process, content and governance services and plays a key role in McDermott's overall digital ecosystem.