MAS Upgrade
Plain sailing: How Stena Drilling and Cohesive completed an award-winning Maximo Application Suite upgrade
Stena Drilling is one of the world’s foremost independent drilling contractors, with a fleet of five ultra deepwater drillships, one semi-submersible rig, and over 1,100 employees around the globe.
The business, whose vessels are used by the oil and gas industry, was keen to embrace the modern capabilities of the Maximo Application Suite (MAS). But it was conscious too of the complexities it faced in upgrading from 7.6.1.3 which it had been using for its management, maintenance and procurement processes across its fleet.
These challenges included its vessels – which drill in water depths of up to 12,000 ft – being located in remote, offshore environments with limited connectivity.
Together we completed what is believed to be the first example, globally, of a marine MAS implementation in a high-risk, disconnected environment.
The on-time, on-budget upgrade was executed with zero operational disruption. It secured a MaximoWorld 2025 award in recognition of the best-in-class approach and outcomes.
Cohesive continues to support Stena Drilling’s stand-out asset management. Future activities will include the implementation of MAS mobile, as well as enhancement of its electronic permits and other HSE capabilities within the MAS suite.
Marine
The Challenge
• Connectivity: Stena’s Drilling’s six vessels are located in demanding offshore and remote environments, often with limited connectivity.
• Scope creep risk: The new architecture requirements for MAS posed complexities, especially for local installations on vessels. Single Node OpenShift (SNO) was not a standard deployment for MAS implementations at the time and Stena Drilling did not want any issues to impact on the upgrade timeline.
• Integrations: Multiple other software solutions that Stena Drilling relies on for commercial and work order tasks required integration with MAS. The changeover had to be smooth and seamless with no concerns about downtime, duplicate or lost data.
Our Solution
Cohesive developed with Stena Drilling a tailored MAS upgrade path. It included use of our proprietary Cohesive Data Utility (CDU) tool – an ETL upgrade tool designed to support complex MAS upgrades, like those found in offshore and remote environments. It also included our Cohesive Data Replicator, which promotes continuous data alignment for disconnected environments. Both tools are IBM approved.
Our program included:
• Hybrid architecture: We developed a hybrid solution with Stena Drilling with a local instance of MAS installed on each remote vessel and a new central MAS installation at its Aberdeen HQ which is hosted on the dedicated Cohesive cloud. Each ‘MAS environment’ was built shoreside before being sent to the vessel and the sequence for physical shipping of infrastructure agreed.
• A seamless, ‘no surprises’ cut over: Once hardware was onboard each vessel it sat ‘silent’ onboard while being kept up to date with all data changes. Each vessel was cut over only after full ‘end to end’ testing.
• Full support: Throughout the early ‘go live’ stages the Cohesive team provided heightened levels of support to ensure no issues arose.
• Expert delivery team: Our team was a trusted partner to Stena Drilling having worked with it to implement Maximo as the core EAM system across its fleet in 2019. They brought the knowledge and experience gained from working with multiple other oil and gas clients and clients working in remote environments, including the British Antarctic Survey.
“Landing a project this size is all about having the correct people that both have subject matter expert knowledge and the insight of how the business is operating. Every part of the business impacted by the change needs to be part of the process and development team. With this project, we were fortunate to have an awesome team..”
Martin Eklund – Asset Performance Superintendent, Stena Drilling
The Client Benefits
Delivered on time and on budget, the Application Suite went live in the first week of April 2025. MAS is now a key ‘team member’ on Stena’s Drilling’s six vessels and its Aberdeen HQ. The key benefits have been:
• ‘Real time’ operations in its less-connected environments.
• Ability to fully realize all the capabilities of MAS to enhance its asset performance management and reliability centred maintenance.
• Use of our hosting services means it can focus on its core business without worrying about networks, servers, storage, operating systems, middleware, or about the security of its data.
• Its MaximoWorld award (‘best connected workforce’ category) has further enhanced its industry-leading reputation.