The application and adoption of collaboration centers in the E&P industry has increased significantly in the past decade. The benefits of collaboration center utilization have been clearly identified including the delivery of cost-effective and fully integrated multidiscipline field, reservoir and well management decisions.Saudi Aramco has established a number of collaboration centers that directly capitalize on large scale, multidiscipline, value added technical and business collaborations. These centers, for instance, cover areas of Exploration, Geosteering, Real-time Drilling, Field Development, Production and Intelligent Field Management. Tangible economic and technical benefits of such collaboration encompasses: improved recovery, improved technical workflows, technology innovation, enhanced staff skill set development, and significant reduction of critical field development study cycle times. This paper outlines Saudi Aramco's experience from 5 years of utilizing multidiscipline collaboration workrooms with a focus on facility design, technology (software and hardware) support and lessons learned.

Summary The application and adoption of collaboration centers in the exploration and production (E&P) industry have increased significantly in the past decade. The benefits of collaboration-center use have been clearly identified including the delivery of cost-effective and fully integrated multidiscipline field, reservoir, and well management decisions. Saudi Aramco has established a number of collaboration centers that directly capitalize on large-scale, multidiscipline, value-added technical and business collaborations. These centers, for instance, cover areas of exploration, geosteering, real-time drilling, field development, and production and intelligent-field management. Tangible economic and technical benefits of such collaboration encompass improved recovery, improved technical workflows, technology innovation, enhanced staff-skill-set development, and significant reduction of critical field-development-study cycle times. This paper outlines Saudi Aramco's experience from 5 years of using multidiscipline collaboration centers with a focus on facility design, technology (software and hardware) support, and lessons learned. Advances in interactive, high-performance technology solutions (hardware and software) and easy-to-use visual communication technologies present additional opportunities to extend and enhance the value-added impact of collaboration centers, including virtual collaboration. The need for physical, localized centers will be discussed, compared, and evaluated in the context of virtual-collaboration-center potential. The paper presents a "checklist" methodology for collaboration-center design, layout, support, and maintenance incorporating the challenges of continuous technology advancement and multidiscipline project complexity.

Saudi Aramco has established the Upstream Professional Development Center (UPDC) to train its geoscientists and engineers to independently and proficiently conduct a wide range of exploration and production operations and its systems analysts in providing a collaborative environment for executing these operations. Its purpose is not to replace academic institutions but rather to complement them by introducing activity and performance-based training (PBT) programs. The objective is not only to improve the organization's overall performance level but to raise the standards of its entire workforce as well.This paper describes how UPDC's Upstream Computing job family designs, develops and delivers its courses for recently hired Upstream digital professionals (computer scientists and software engineers). It outlines how to effectively train them to acquire a fundamental understanding of a wide range of oil and gas exploration and production (Upstream) operations and to use this knowledge to support, maintain and develop an equally wide range of software applications used for facilitating everyday Upstream operations.Saudi Aramco's systems analysts are loaned by their line organizations to UPDC to design and implement these courses based on their work experiences and best practices. To teach and/or re-enforce technical concepts, and for employees to gain appreciation of these practices, over 50% of class time is devoted to activities, assessments, reviews and discussions. For the advancement of mid-career digital professionals, performance-based curriculums (identified by Saudi Aramco as -career professional curriculums‖) are also being developed. An overview on how these curriculums are designed based on job outcome requirements will be outlined. UPDC instructors use advanced audiovisual, animation and simulation technologies for effective course delivery and promoting in-class activity participation.