Implementation of Agility Concepts into Oil Industry

Petroleum companies have great interest in developing their countries through improving their resources to be more competitive. They are also trying to maintain a high level of responsiveness to achieve agility and to remain competitive in the global marketplace especially after instability of oil prices and global financial crisis. Agile systems (AS) is considered as the next industrial revolution. Agile systems are considered as production and/or management philosophies that integrate the available technology, people, production strategies and organization management systems. Although agility is the set of capabilities and competences that the petroleum companies need to thrive and prosper in a continuously changing and unpredictable business environment, measuring the level of agility in these companies is still unexplored according to the capabilities and competences. There are limited number of scientific papers have mentioned agility measurements in industrial organizations as a general concept and in oil industry as a specific concern. In this paper, a conceptual model will be proposed to measure the agility level of the petroleum companies based on existing technologies, level of qualifying human resources, production strategies, and organization management systems. Several case studies will be presented to demonstrate the proposed issues and technique through an agility questionnaire which is used for assessing the agility level of these companies. These studies provide the readers with an insight into the companies and their agility levels.