What's new in production

As with seemingly every other human endeavor in the 21st century, oil and gas production produces data. Accurate, timely management of this digital flow to account for production, is at the core of an operating company’s business. Thus, apps to do just that are headed for your tablet and smartphone, where they can compete for your attention with Sim City or Solitaire.

Peter Westwood, technical director of Scotland-based EnergySys, is happy to tell you why you should use a tablet (in his case, an iPad) for this core business function in the first place: It’s yours (and the tablet knows it), small and convenient, mobile-connected, reasonably secure, and easy to use.

To Westwood, the tablet ecosystem is unique. “It generates lots of cheap applications; has a graphical interface that lets you use obvious metaphors; changes your expectations of what’s possible; is something that needs little or no technical support, almost irrespective of the complexity of applications; and has a truly low total cost of ownership.

“It makes your information world easy to access anywhere with limited compromise, and can actually provide an improved experience. It infiltrates your way of working, and even how you live. It is rapidly becoming a commodity like the telephone. The momentum is there, and very soon it will be the expectation of normal life. Couple it with secure access to all your information resources and you have a really powerful tool for living well.

“I want to get my data where I am. I want to be able to see what needs to be done and take the actions I need to, to get things sorted out. While the smart phone allows me to do some of this, the iPad is a lot better. The only real compromise being that it does not fit in my pocket. Against my laptop, the convenience improvement is surprisingly substantial.

“The cloud gives you secure access to critical business data, and your iPad gives you identity and a rich visualization and service aggregation, with almost zero system administration or support required. That sounds like a much better place.”

You could say Westwood has a strong opinion about this. As he puts it, “Cloud + tablet = freedom from the tyranny of technology!”

This is light years beyond the days of shoving punch cards into the Univac, for sure. But, when you’re ready do something beyond looking for a restaurant on Yelp, do mobile, cloud-based tools for serious business use fulfill the promise? For production-related tasks, the company has an answer—several, actually—for hydrocarbon allocation and reporting, reserves reporting, and corporate reporting. (Still in the oven is a tool for environmental reporting.)

Hidden costs of spreadsheets. Mobile, cloud-based apps (this phrase begs for a buzzword) are intended to address the usual suspects, among them agility, evolving IT strategies, compliance and business efficiency. In a recent white paper, the company also talks ominously of “… the elephant in the room. The fact, widely acknowledged but little spoken about, is that much of this valuable data, in many companies, is stored and manipulated in spreadsheets.

“These corporate assets have limited controls, minimal audit trails, and are often of dubious provenance. This holds true, even in companies that have invested heavily in major systems… Even those with major systems in place tend to find that the cost of change, both in resources and impact on the business, is high enough that spreadsheets are often used to supplement core functionality. This is the worst of all possible worlds.”

They cite the example of a company with a large number of non-operated assets. The task of collating data received daily from multiple different operators in multiple different spreadsheet formats was formidable. It required a week’s work every month for the hydrocarbon accountant to collate and validate the data. The company claims its cloud-based solution reduced the task to two hours.

An observation in the white paper should resonate with many, especially those on the vendor side of things: the imbalance between a person’s view of the value of his or her time, versus almost any level of cash expenditure. “People regularly undertake routine, low-value, low-level tasks because it is simpler, or quicker, or because training or recruiting someone, or implementing an automated solution, would be too expensive or take too long. In truth, this is frequently encouraged by companies who impose stricter controls on the expenditure of [small amounts] than they do on the wasteful utilization of days of staff time.”

Suboptimal tools. You may be wondering why many operating companies choose suboptimal tools for such a critical function. In the view of Dr. Peter Black, EnergySys managing director, many companies will use spreadsheets in-house to avoid the expense of an outside solution. “People generally do a very bad job of it overall. [Outside providers] are in the man-time servicing business; if you look at any of the large traditional providers, they are selling man-time… as the business, and therefore, it’s not in their interest to deliver the kind of capability that makes delivery of a solution much easier.”

In a recent newspaper article, a senior technology executive from a major operating company groused, “In oil and gas, it has traditionally been an insular community. More and more, we bring in other technologies, but I think we can do an awful lot more.” Our executive need not worry; performing production allocation tasks from a tablet in the cloud is an attempt to do just that.

Before long, the term “cloudy” may have a meaning that meteorologists never imagined. It’s becoming a factor that enables insight rather than obscuring it.