"To be competitive, the company needed visibility into its costs. It is critical for them to understand the results of every dial they are spinning and every lever they are pulling every day, so they need access to every single data point in real time."
The problem
In the oil and gas industry, speed and efficiency are key, as are lean processes. As this provider grew via M&A, their disparate processes and data storage architecture, as well as the manual nature of data collection, made it difficult to integrate new assets into the company while providing full visibility into production and operations.
“To be competitive, the company needed visibility into all its costs,” said a Blueprint business development director. “It is critical for them to understand the results of every dial they are spinning and every lever they are pulling every day, so they need access to every single data point in real time.”
A full report on how a new well was performing, for example, could take as long as a month to complete because data was printed out and shared, manually uploaded into spreadsheets that were passed from team to team and then turned into graphs, charts and power points. This process was made even more challenging because there were no standards around well identifiers, well names or the status of a well, and some data was only accessible by certain individuals. The company needed to remove all the manual processes that were creating inconsistencies in data and then aggregate and migrate it all into a single data store accessible to everyone. The goal was to enable quick, holistic reporting and decision making, all while allowing for scalability in the future.
The Blueprint Way
Blueprint’s oil and gas team began by assessing the overall impact of the company’s challenges, looking at systems in their entirety and creating a long-term plan. In true Blueprint form, they then broke that plan down into short release cycles with tangible milestones at each to provide immediate ROI and help move the client closer to their overall goals.
Blueprint was able to rapidly develop and adopt a cloud-based data integration plan built on Azure, pulling all existing data into a common data store with modern architecture, using Azure SQL and Azure Data factory. An automated data aggregation process utilizing Power BI was implemented, powering a suite of custom-built reporting dashboards that quickly delivered actionable, focused information. From high-level overviews for senior decision-makers to drill-down reports focusing on micro-events for field workers, faster reporting and decision-making was enabled company-wide.
“Previously, it took a whole team of people and a lot of time to gather and dig through the data to find and prioritize ‘workover candidates’ ― the wells that need attention because they are no longer making money,” A Blueprint delivery manager said. “Now they have a dashboard that literally gives them a prioritized list of the wells that are under-performing.”
This solution reduced the time from data collection to reporting significantly while also reducing the time required to integrate new data and assets received through acquisitions. With complete data integration into a common data store, the stage is also set for future growth, allowing for the quick intake of disparate data that comes with each future acquisition.
“This plumbing and architectural foundation will allow them to plug a newly acquired system right in, adding it to the dashboarding they already have and get that much more visibility into their processes,” A Blueprint solution development manager said. “It is an actual business intelligence platform.”
