Thinking business in the oil field

The digital oil field has been around arguably for almost a decade, however, many E&P and oil field services companies are still struggling to get value from the massive amounts of data. We’d like our workers to think like business people and stockholders, so how can oil field workers make timely, cost effective decisions in the oil patch?
Chip Johnson, Austin, TX

Executives, managers and engineers at oil and gas companies are challenged to make effective decisions on a daily basis throughout the exploration and production process. The application of various technology elements - like real-time data capture, modeling and simulation, collaborative visualization and business intelligence - during the evolution of the digital oil field has improved this capability. However, through industry research, work with our clients and other independent studies, we believe that there are still additional ways to improve the effectiveness of E&P decision-making.

The challenge is to fundamentally improve an employee's ability to be more effective in applying the significant technology investments that have been made over the last decade. These challenges can be met with renewed attention on employee and team collaboration and better efforts around managing and using the digital information that digital oilfield projects create in great quantities.

Social networking

Social networking is the practice of using web technologies to connect people who have common interests. Many oil companies have adapted some of these practices and capabilities, like Facebook and LinkedIn, to help employees share knowledge more effectively. The age and knowledge gap between new employees and 'seasoned' employees is huge, and transferring knowledge now from the older to the younger workers is imperative. One of the first challenges to adoption involves really learning how people do their knowledge-based work. Who do they go to for answers? Where is the information that they need to do their jobs kept? How is information distilled into knowledge? Through collaboration and network analysis, very specific programs can be developed to allow users to share and improve their operational knowledge.

'Role-based' view

Another key task is to make sure that the information is presented in a manner that addresses the role and work context of the user. Production engineers have views of their wells and fields and their specific technical documents and procedures. Operations managers can have higher-level views of fields and profiles of fields with KPIs and indicators of problem areas. Financial analysts have views of specific well and lease related cost and budget information with project performance forecasts and ROI. Procurement has a view of preferred suppliers, pricing information, and contract documents. But these different types of data have multiple users and must not be stove piped by job function. In this way, each member of the team can quickly make decisions in their area of expertise which are derived from the same quality base data sets and in collaboration with other members of the asset team.

Business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) is a recent phenomenon in this industry. BI tools and processes were originally used by data-intensive industries, such as retail, to gather and analyze large amounts of 'transactional' or financial information; digging into what customers are buying or analyzing spend in a particular business unit. In order to provide better decision making in the oil patch and extend the capabilities of existing E&P workflows, BI analytics need to be pushed lower in the organization where they are useful in helping organizations pull together the technical, operational, and financial components of oil field decision making processes. When properly implemented, petroleum BI would enable an engineer to provide the decision support tools and processes to analyze the ROI of the recommendation by bringing together real-time production data, cost data from vendors, inventory availability and past success on similar wells - as well as to determine what the best technical remediation might be for a well.

In summary, improving decision making in the oil patch is about finding out how individuals do their work and providing the data, processes and tools that enable oil field workers to act like business people and think like shareholders. 

Bill Kuzmich is CSC's Global Energy Sector Leader. He has been involved in

consulting, engineering and business development activities for more than

30 years.