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Why it’s Crucial You Organize Around Your Database (Not Personalities) in Oil and Gas Asset Management
Have you seen the remarkable new things that are being done with oil & gas data management these days?
“What new things?” you ask.
The new things that give you control of your oil & gas assets like you’ve never had before.
Control is key.
What most operators are telling us is that they’re frustrated by not being able to get the most out of their production assets. Frustrated by late or incorrect data coming from the field. Frustrated by having to organize this data after it arrives from the field. Frustrated by hiring more people than they need to manage these assets.
By working with supposed “experts” who don’t seem to know what they’re doing. By a breakdown in communication and transparency with those who work on the front line in the field.
Do these things ever frustrate you?
Of course they do. And that’s why we’ve embarked on a labor of love that is oil and gas information Control; so that you can get the most from the people in your operations without paying an arm and a leg for it. Now we know that sounds too good to be true.
Allow us to suggest how we propose to go about doing that for you…
How can we make it possible for you to get the most from everyone in your operations, both in the field and in the office?
It’s quite simple really: through a A Killer App for Oilfield Operators.
By downloading the app to your smartphone, to the smartphones of your pumpers, and the smartphones of your field supervisor, admin, and management, we alleviate the frustrations of oil and gas data management.
Not personally (through people), but systematically (read: automatically) through oilfield software that’s easy as pie to use. Essentially, the app works so you don’t have to.
So simple in hindsight, what we’re prescribing is a completely familiar and predictable oil data management platform which produces results which were formerly unpredictable and nearly impossible to achieve.
Simplicity rules the day. And, to achieve these type of results from oilfield automation and workflow – in addition to equipment being checked, oil and water being gauged, meters being read, wells tested, gas sold, and repairs made – the oil production software must be simple.
“The System”, Explained
The information will be recorded by your pumpers on their smartphones while at the wellsite. The oil & gas data management system will seamlessly track the activity of your oil & gas wells, compressors, and disposal wells from day to day, benchmark to benchmark.
And as such, the app will tell you an astonishing number of things:
- How much oil and gas was lost during the month because of lease problems.
- Projected dollar amount of the loss.
- The importance of equipment maintenance.
- Special problems.
- Which wells are beginning to have downhole problems such as pump wear.
- Assist in determining when productivity tests should be conducted.
- Monthly analysis of well conditions.
- Increased production from wells that have been worked over.
- The feasibility of working over other wells.
- Loss of production that occurs with time and natural depletion.
Perhaps even more importantly, your oil field management software can give you insights into the activities of your guys and gals in the field. It can tell you which particular pumpers are properly managing their route and their wells — and which ones aren’t.
In short, proper oil and gas information management could tell you the things you need to know. Things you don’t know now.
It’s the data you need to know to develop, control, and change your operations. And information you need internally for Finance and Accounting and externally for the relationships with your Service Companies.
If the people in your operations are the glue that holds your operations together, then good data is the glue that holds your people together. Good data tells you when, what, and whom you need to change.
Without it, you might as well put a blindfold on, spin around, and set out with a dart in your hand determined to hit your mark. Not a very promising game.
Systems, actions, assets, and data. The stuff of which our operations are made – our livelihood.
Better Oil and Gas Database Management
That to approach any part of your operations as though it were separate from all the rest would be lunacy, because everything in your operations affects everything else in your company. That your Management Strategy, and your People Strategy, and your Growth Strategy, and your Strategic Objective, and your Organizational Strategy, and your Systems Strategy — and even your lack of strategy— are all totally interdependent, rather than independent of one another.
Do you see how difficult it is to separate one from the other? Do you see how intertwined they are? Do you now understand what we mean by your oil and gas asset management “System”? And why it is absolutely essential that you begin to think of your operations as a fully integrated oil & gas database?
Know that the success of your operations totally depends on your appreciation of that integration and that your oil and gas asset management workflow is that integration.
Most people in business have heard the old adage that 80 percent of our results are produced by 20 percent of our inputs. Unfortunately, few seem to know what the 20 percent of the activities are that are making up the lion’s share of the results.
Well, allow us to suggest something: the operators who have uncovered the 20 percent of the activities that make up the Holy Grail of oil & gas production are using a well-thought oil and gas information management System. The other 80 percent of operators aren’t.
An oil & gas data management system is a soft System. That said, it’s ultimately designed and fed by people. And although we’ve seen well designed oil and gas databases in some cases produce up to a 50% reduction in overhead for the operator, we’ve also seen countless oil field automation initiatives crash and burn (taking thousands of man hours and millions of dollars with them…)
So, what does a well-designed, lightweight oil data management System look like?
It’s a fully orchestrated interaction between you and your field personnel that follows six primary steps:
- Capture the necessary information from your field personnel.
- Check against historical information to make sure this data indeed makes sense – that it’s ‘clean.’
- Give feedback to the pumper in the form of graphs and notes from which he can further engage the well (yes, given the right information, most pumpers are willing to give you much more than you’re currently getting from them).
- Deliver this information to management and in-house folks, and display it via an Oil & Gas Management Dashboard in a way which enables the company to look at their operations from unique and different vantage points to quickly pick out and address anomalies.
- Automate the flow of hot and fresh scheduled reports to management, engineers, accounting, and partners each morning, highlighting yesterday’s production numbers.
- Sync real-time data with other 3rd party software systems, such as accounting, production, or other centralized databases.
All this leaves your people to communicate more effectively by articulating, watching, listening, hearing, acknowledging, understanding, and engaging each and every well as fully as it needs to be engaged.
More importantly, the how doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective. In fact, some of the most powerful innovations have required little more than the change of a simple process, workflow, or methodology.
Don’t Organize Around Personalities, Organize Around Your Data
All organizations are hierarchical. At each level, people serve under those above them. Oil and gas is no different. The operator is therefore a structured institution.
If it is not structured, it is a mob. And mobs don’t get things done; they destroy things.
Everyone wants to “get organized.” But when you suggest that they start by creating automation workflow, all you get is doubtful — and sometimes hostile — stares.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” a client once retorted. “We’re just a small operator. We don’t need a new workflow. We need better people!”
Despite his protestations we persisted, because we knew something he didn’t. We knew that the organizational development reflected in one’s production data management workflow between field and office can have a more profound impact on a small operator than any other single business development step.
Most companies organize around personalities rather than around functions. That is, around people rather than accountabilities or responsibilities. The result is almost always chaos.
We’re not interested in different, we’re interested in better. That said, we specialize in designing, building, launching, and growing a turn-key oil field management software for communication between operators and their folks in the field.
A portable oil and gas database management solution that our clients can (1) download to their smartphone, and (2) immediately roll out to their operations all in less than an afternoon.
From there, what the operator decides to do is up to them… whether they choose to operate 1 well or 10,000, the oil field software system will deliver the right information, in the right way, at the right time, in exactly the manner they need it to run their operations most effectively and most profitably.
To bake a bigger cake, all the operator needs do is add more wells.
The system works, so you don’t have to, so you can grow your business.
And, while operators are enabled to simply focus on operating (i.e. producing oil & gas in the most cost effective manner possible), we’re always improving on our production data management software system. Innovation, quantification, and orchestration. Through the art of organization of your oil & gas data, we’re continually improving the System for our clients.
To keep your costs as low as possible, GreaseBook runs on whatever device your pumper already owns Apple, Android, or Microsoft.
Imagine trying to produce such a consistent result without an integrated oil field manager software System to manage your oil & gas data. Imagine each engineer, every pumper, at all of your current (and future) wells, doing his or her own thing.
How would anything be communicated consistently, in which every gauge sheet, every Excel workbook, every idea of organization, every kind of process and system were expressed in an individual and subjective way by each and every one of your people without any standards, without any agreement, without any consistency in form, without any consistency in judgment?
Is that an appealing picture to you?
Because we’re exhausted just thinking about it!
Through our inquiry of oil field pros like yourself, and the oil and gas asset management system we’ve designed for the active solicitation of specific information, GreaseBook has replaced the guessing, the blind hope, and the feverish busy work running rampant in most oil & gas operations.
Innovation, Quantification, and Orchestration have become the driving forces behind our efforts.
The fact is, any operator can do it.
And given the environment today in oil and gas, every operator must!
GreaseBook works beautifully on any computer, PC or Mac.
