Reviews & Profile for Vista Projects

Hands-on System Integration Experience
Some things are best learned through experience. It’s the process of trial and error that teaches the tricks of a trade.

Vista Projects is a longstanding integrated engineering consulting firm. For over 35 years, we’ve specialized in facility engineering design for the upstream oil and gas sector.

In the last few years, we’ve developed a dedicated system integration consulting service and recently became a channel partner with AVEVA. 

Our system integration knowledge has grown through experience since our own digital transformation began in the early 2010s. As a traditional engineering firm, we recognized an opportunity to:

✔ focus more time on high-value tasks
✔ improve operational efficiency
✔ help clients lower costs

By 2015, we implemented one of the most comprehensive digital engineering environments in the energy sector. The results were transformative and there was no going back to the old way of executing engineering projects.

The advantage to clients now is that Vista offers a unique mix of engineering services and system integration consulting. It’s based on nearly a decade’s worth of firsthand experience with our own digital transformation journey.

It hasn’t been all roses and unicorns. We’ve experienced the organizational growing pains firsthand and iteratively optimized workflows to smooth the implementation.

When you know what works and what doesn’t, you can make digital transformation in oil and gas operations seamless for all of the stakeholders within your organization.

“We’ve had clients come to us where they hired a technology consulting firm to implement the digital engineering environment and technical data portal. But their team wasn’t embracing the system,” says Scott Mussbacher, Vista’s System Integration Lead.

“The workflows and rollout processes are critical to gaining user adoption and maximizing the technology investments. And so that’s one of the things we take pride in. We don’t just hand over a toolset for them to use. Instead, we work with them to develop workflows that work within their organization and with the new tools that we’ve set up for them.”

You Need to Switch Your Mind
In speaking about her own experience changing to a digital workflow, Engineering Manager Jennifer Gray, a long-time Vista employee, says having the right mindset can go a long way. 

“At first, like any kind of change, it’s a little bit of an adjustment. But I got into it really quickly because it was so efficient.

“I went through school printing out reports, check-printing the hard copy with a red pen, and now you check-print on the screen. You just need to shift your mind, but you plan to shift your mind and are determined to do it. Now I couldn’t possibly go back to printing it out with a rough copy and hand marking it with a pen.”

People often focus on the switch from paper to the screen. Printed documents are entrenched in the world of professional engineering, and removing paper from your daily routine is a tangible difference your staff will notice.

Cost Savings
But while there is a positive environmental impact to using less paper, the printing-related cost savings are negligible compared to the broader benefits of going digital.

The real savings are realized from:

✔ a single-source-of-truth database
✔ automated quality checks
✔ fully digitized workflows

When all project stakeholders have on-demand access to authoritative data, it leads to:

✔ enhanced transparency
✔ increased collaboration
✔ better decision making

This all adds up to a higher quality engineering product, less rework, and millions of dollars in cost savings.

Achieving this level of success requires a collaborative effort from all stakeholders.  

True Collaboration Requires Trust
A project execution workflow centered around on-demand access to verifiable data means exposing colleagues and clients to deliverables that are still in development. This is typically a difficult aspect of digital transformation for people to embrace. 

As Vista CEO Bashar Hussien puts it: “We tell clients they will see our dirty laundry. So don’t be surprised. The idea is to make them feel that there is nothing we are hiding.”

Gone are the days of passing deliverables over the fence to the client or another discipline for review. Everyone collaborates in real-time now.

Simplify Your Digital Transformation
Digital transformation in oil and gas is still in the early stages.

From digitizing brownfield assets to helping new technologies get to market faster, this is the time to be investing in the efficiencies of digital execution. But it is also a time when most companies can’t afford to implement a system that doesn’t get used to its full potential. 

At Vista, we have years of first-hand system integration experience and continue to advance our own project execution. 

If you would like a cold eyes review of your implementation or help to maximize the return on your digital transformation investments, contact Vista today to schedule a consultation.