ExxonMobil Global Projects Company Transforms Collaboration on Major Capital Projects Using AWS

Document review is a critical MCP engineering workflow during which engineers review and approve controlled documents and drawings that define the design specifications for those capital projects. On average, a review team has four engineers and one lead reviewer with a contractually mandated service-level agreement of 10 days for each review.

ExxonMobil’s document review process is ripe for better collaboration. Comments may be duplicative or contradictory when they are not visible between reviewers during a review period. The engineers collaborate using multiple tools like document sharing and editing platforms, but that means they spend additional time switching between tools, decreasing productivity and creating a negative user experience. Manual document routing may take up to one business day out of the service-level agreement time—longer in cases of business-interrupting events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic—reducing the amount of time for review and occasionally leading to bottlenecks in the workflow. The lead reviewer also rationalizes comments from the reviewing engineers, a time-consuming step before the final sign-off.

ExxonMobil built its DPH platform on AWS for an MCP where it is leading the construction and operation of a future natural gas liquefaction plant and related facilities. To help build the DPH solution, ExxonMobil and AWS Professional Services engaged two AWS partners: Pariveda Solutions Inc., an AWS Premier Consulting Partner that is also supporting DPH in production, and projekt202, which applies experience strategy and observational insights to the development of software to improve the user experience. projekt202 is a subsidiary of Amdocs, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner.

DPH integrates with ExxonMobil’s existing Active Directory (AD) and is based on cloud-native serverless architecture, enabling ExxonMobil to build with increased agility and innovation and lower total cost of ownership. The low-friction serverless architecture also eliminates infrastructure management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance, and capacity provisioning—making the platform compliant with ExxonMobil’s Enterprise Architecture mandates. The company uses AWS Lambda, which lets users run code without provisioning or managing servers. The serverless compute functions at every layer of the DPH platform, enabling it to be independently scalable while providing the benefits of the pay-per-use cloud model. The platform’s APIs are managed by Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

ExxonMobil expects to use its DPH platform for multiple MCPs worldwide—meaning thousands of users collaborating through multiple simultaneous business workflows—so platform elasticity is critical for business. The platform’s data is stored in the fully managed, multiregion, multimaster, durable Amazon DynamoDB, a serverless key-value and document database that delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. The website is hosted on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

ExxonMobil has full control of its data in DPH. Its data is encrypted at rest using encryption keys that the company owns and manages using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), while the data in transit is encrypted using Transport Layer Security certificates also provided by ExxonMobil. To manage activity on the platform, DPH pairs retention policies with AWS CloudTrail, a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing, and Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and observability service that provides companies with data and actionable insights to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.