Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) is a parent company property of the Republic of Venezuela. PDVSA is in charge of the development of petroleum, petrochemical, and coal industries. The main objective of the company is planning, coordinating, supervising, and controlling the activities of its subsidiaries, both in Venezuela and abroad. The three main Venezuelan oil companies, Corpoven, Lagoven, and Maraven, are vertically integrated companies engaged in exploration, production, and refining as well as in national and international marketing. These activities are complemented by refining companies abroad, directed towards US, European, and Caribbean markets. PDVSA owns 100% of CITGO and has other partnerships with organizations such as Unocal, German, and Swedish petroleum companies. Venezuela exports over 2.3 million barrels per day of crude and products, close to 70% of which go to the United States, PDVSA's largest market. Most of its products in this market are sold by PDVSA's CITGO subsidiary, the third-largest gasoline supplier in the US, and the largest in terms of sales outlets.

The former Corpoven, S.A. division of PDVSA, is a flexible, vertically integrated company in Venezuela, engaged in the international hydrocarbons business. In the context of the current structure of Venezuela's petroleum industry, the division is an oil and gas operating company, with fully integrated activities of exploration, production, refining, transportation, and marketing. This division operates 3,500 wells, 5 installations for crude storage, 3 refineries, 3 deep-water terminals, and 9,000 Km of oil and gas pipelines. It's Cryogenic complex has a capacity of 1800 MMSCFD and consists of two NLG extraction plants and a fractionation plant. PDV Manufacturing and Trade has about 850 gas stations throughout Venezuela and over 12,500 employees.

The former Maraven, S.A. division of PDVSA, is a wholly owned subsidiary. A fully integrated oil company, this division engaged in the exploration, production, and refinement of hydrocarbons. Through this division, PDVSA also markets crude and refined products internationally. With a work force of approximately 11,000 employees, principal operating activities are situated in western Venezuela. Production is primarily concentrated in the State of Zulia, and the company's main refining complex is located in the State of Falcón. In the Zuata area of the Orinoco Belt, in eastern Venezuela, they oversee production of the largest heavy and extra-heavy crude reserves in the world. The company is currently developing strategic associations with major international oil companies to produce, upgrade, and market these crude products. PDVSA's proven crude reserves in 1995 rose to over 20 billion barrels. Its crude production capacity is one million barrels per day from fields covering an area of 33,800 square kilometers. The organization's production division operates 39 on-land oil fields totaling 11,694 wells, and 11 production blocks on Lake Maracaibo totaling 2,338 wells. Production of this magnitude requires an extensive support infrastructure, which includes 30 gas compression plants, 17 water and 14 steam injection plants, 334 flow stations, 8 large tank farms, and 3 export loading terminals.

The former Lagoven, S.A division of PDVSA, is a company in charge of 42% of Venezuela's proven crude reserves. They extract 40% of the Nation's oil production, and refines close to 48% of the crude processed in the country. This division carries out 40% of all export sales, employs 30% of the state oil-sector workforce, and contributes almost half of the national fiscal income generated by the hydrocarbons activity.

The Business Challenges

The former Corpoven, S.A. division of PDVSA
Project: Engineer Document Automation
The 25-seat Novation implementation at the Gerencia General de Ingenieria y Proyectos G.G.I.P. de Corpoven, S.A. in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela launched PDVSA into document management. The project started by defining main processes for Engineering and finished with the development of over 25 custom database tables and 80 custom screens.

The former Maraven, S.A. division of PDVSA
Project: Well Files Project
In this project Novasoft was implemented to give access to reservoir studies and drilling proposals for all who need it---geologists, petrophysicists, drilling, reservoir, and production engineers from operations through management levels. This amounted to over 4 million pages of information on over 14,300 wells to maintain and keep current. The ability to access this information for accurate and in-depth research has great strategic importance for Maraven's business. The NovaManage document management and workflow implementation met Maraven's needs and has given them a competitive advantage: documentation is instantly accessible, revisions can be carefully tracked, and updates without duplication can be achieved with great efficiency.

Project: Technical Document System
A NovaManage solution was implemented, consisting of integration with Myriad multipage & Excalibur FTR, AutoCAD, Interleaf Worldview, Microsoft Tools, and ORACLE Forms (to be migrated to NovaForms). The project controls and records all technical documentation at the site, including design and manufacturing documents, operating manuals, engineering notes, CAD & raster files, procedures, and inspection notes. The project took advantage of NovaManage's document acceptance and retrieval, version control, and document change control capabilities.

The Return on Investment

After NovaManage was implemented, PDVSA could immediately take advantage of the following benefits:

• Immediate access to documents in various physical locations.
• Electronic management of documents.
• Version control, and ensuring users only handle latest version as default.
• Greatly reduced development time on major projects.
• A strong standard for managing documents.
• Secure document storage and access privileges as well as user profile security.
• High level of integration with other applications.
• Batch register automation to input hundreds of documents quickly.
  

The Technologies

Corpoven, S.A., Engineer Document Automation

• 80 users
• 1 Hewlett Packard UNIX 9000 server, series 750
• 15 Hewlett Packard UNIX 9000 workstations, series 700
• 10 Compaq workstations
• 2 network plotters
• NovaManage v6.048 was integrated with AutoCAD 12 for UNIX and Windows, Myriad, and standard office applications
• The network uses Windows 3.1 with TCP/IP to connect to the Oracle 6.36 server
• Documents stored in NovaManage included 6,000 engineering drawings and specifications, as well as general documents

Maraven, S.A., Well Files Project

• 480 users
• 90 GB Magnetic, 120 GB Optics total capacity of storage 210 GB
• PCs 486 66 MHz 16 MB RAM Windows 3.1
• UNIX server w/128 MB RAM and 2 CPU backup unit
• NovaManage, ORACLE database, Ethernet LAN, with standard Office applications
• Remote scanning & printing centers: in Maracaibo and Caracas
• 14,300 files, totaling over 4 millions pages

Maraven, S.A., Technical Document System

• 13 Netware servers
• 11 HP & SUN servers
• 7 DECNET servers connected in FDDI network