Prioritization of a Portfolio of Projects

The high competitiveness in the oil sector, the velocity of changes in the world and the increasingly short life cycles of projects, have forced the large companies in this sector to maintain extensive project portfolios in engineering. These demand efficient management and balancing, because otherwise the competitive position relative to other companies is placed at risk. These companies have the challenge of developing appropriate methodologies to manage the portfolios and provide support to the decision makers, aiming at maximizing the results of the projects. One of the activities of portfolio management, and perhaps the most difficult, is the adequate prioritization of the projects, because it involves great subjectivity in the direct comparison of highly different projects, with different objectives and at times contrary in the use of criteria that depend on sensitivity evaluations. An example is the improvement in society’s perception of the company’s image that a project may provide. For the prioritization of these projects, it becomes necessary to employ multiple-criteria analyses, and for this, the organization needs to define how many, and which criteria are going to be utilized, together with their relative importance. This article has the purpose of describing the implantation of a prioritization methodology for projects utilizing the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) analysis technique in a regional office of the largest logistics company in South America, Transpetro. The company forms part of the Brazilian oil system; more specifically in the transport and storage of oil and oil products. The company operates a fleet of 55 ships having the transport capacity of 2.9 million deadweight tons, 7,033 km of oil pipelines and 3,600 km of gas pipelines, 20 land-based terminals and 26 water-based terminals. The dynamic of the implantation will be presented as the results, demonstrating a preliminary sensitivity analysis, the choice of analytical technique utilizing multiple criteria, the development of a tool and the result of prioritizing the portfolio. In addition, the results of the analysis of this prioritization relative to the existing portfolio will be presented.