SkillBase and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a multinational services US company with deep roots in the oil & gas industry and domain leadership in knowledge management (KM), formed a partnership to bring the best of breed thinking to the Kuwait Petroleum Sector

High Level: The intent and desire of the Kuwait Petroleum Company (KPC) is to embed the learning and reuse of best practices, ulti¬mately enabling performance improvements across the entire organization. The Project was delivered on-time and on-budget successfully meeting its business objectives.

Business Challenge: Finding a proven approach to tailoring and embedding a method¬ology for the effective transfer of best practices across the entire organisation.

• Applying proven project management and best practice transfer methods and following a disciplined approach for effective development and implementation
• Leveraging and building on relevant learning, practices, and programs that already exist within KPC (and subsidiaries) to accelerate understanding and buy-in
• Understanding the critical aspects of behavior and culture and tailoring the best practice methodology to fit KPC.
• Developing competency and ownership in the best practice methodology for repeatable imple¬mentation and sustainable results
• Using an integrated approach that leverages people, processes and technologies for best practice trans¬fer and aligns key stakeholders in the line and functions to maximize performance and minimize risk.

SkillBase value proposition: The partnership between SkillBase and SAIC is based on leveraging the best knowledge and experience of both companies to deliver the best value and ensure the success of the project. Both companies committed senior officers to be corporate offi¬cers-in-charge (COIC) to ensure the authority necessary for effective project execution and to quickly access any additional resources if the need arises. The COICs were also involved in the quality assurance and quality control of the entire project. Our approach was based on flat lines of authority that allow the program manager sufficient authority to organize and execute assigned responsi¬bilities efficiently and cost-effectively. The approach provided the flexibility necessary for efficient per¬formance of simultaneous tasks.

Quote from KPC Management:

KPC and the K-Companies have delivered remarkable business results to date. But the world and our business is rapidly changing. Our ability to learn quickly from each other is key to our continued growth and success. Sharing and transferring best practices routinely across our work teams and leaders will enable us to do things better, faster and cheaper, without having to spend even more time at work stay ahead in our marketplaces. This is what KPC and our consultants have teamed up to do:  “share and transfer the right things for the right reasons,” making your life easier in the process. “There is always a better way.”

KPC Management

SkillBase has been working with Ali Al-Ghanim & Sons (BMW in Kuwait) for a number of years to support the infrastructure for data management.

SkillBase consultants installed and customised one of the leading solutions in the market - the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Product a few years ago. Since the implementation we have been involved in support and enhancements to the critical storage environment.

This storage management software from Tivoli protects from risks of data loss and helps reduce complexity, manage costs and address compliance with data retention and availability requirements.

The Solution from IBM

• Stores backup, archive, restore, compliance and disaster-recovery data in a hierarchy of offline storage
• Protects data on computers running a variety of different operating systems
• Provides storage management and data protection on hardware ranging from notebooks to mainframe computers and connected through the Internet, wide area networks, local area networks or storage area networks
• Combines Web-based storage management software, intelligent data move-and-store techniques and comprehensive policy-based automation to increase data protection and potentially decrease administration time
• Uses a progressive incremental methodology that backs up only new or changed versions of files, greatly reducing data redundancy, network bandwidth and storage pool consumption when compared to traditional methodologies based on periodic full backups 
• Works with storage hardware to exploit other data-reduction techniques such as subfile backup, client compression and device compression, so that you back up less data and save time, space and money

SkillBase has successfully deployed dozens of IBM Storage Solutions in the Middle East region and have a dedicated Team of certified consultants.