Visualization technology has entered a new era

McElvain Oil and Gas, a Denver-based, privately held company with production in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, has been using this technology for many years and has now adopted the newest mapping capabilities and is enthusiastic about the way its data and integrated maps are now interactive.

“This saves us time every day,” said McElvain CFO David Sykes. “We are able to go to from one map to another in seconds. No matter if you’re looking at land or financial or production data, you can do all of that off the same screen, to get the data that’s critical to manage the day-to-day business.”

This translates, of course, into outstanding ROI.

“There’s no downtime. That’s a bottom-line reality,” Sykes said.

Picture this

If your internal processes for handling the documents surrounding your production, accounting, revenue, land, services, marketing, and archival material are not efficient, your business won’t be efficient. More people, more cost, and less return on investment.

“This technology has altered our business in such a way that we would never go back,” Sykes said. “It makes everything easier to manage and easier to control. All of our data is fully integrated, from inventories to actual gas production, to all of our income, leases, contracts, you name it.”

The key factors in calling this technology “next generation” are:

• Data is all entered and processed in a single integrated database. Tracking down siloed material is so 20th century. Because the program is designed to be secure, every department, every individual, from the corporate offices to the field, can upload information and documents which then becomes immediately available to the executives who need it to make business decisions.
• Reporting functionality is now virtually unlimited. Because all the data is connected with no redundancies and no siloed holes, reports on any aspect of the business can be made in minutes rather than the previously standard hours or days. And with graphing ability, charts and interactive maps, the visual realities of the business become obvious.

The greatest benefit is that once data and maps are tied together with automatic, continual updates from the field, what you see today is what is accurate today. Even better – what you see this morning may be updated this afternoon, and you will know it immediately.

Sykes reports that everyone at McElvain, from the field producers to accountants in remote offices, enters data directly into the company system and it is immediately accessible in Denver. It all integrates seamlessly with McElvain’s other software systems, including Microsoft Office products, so that an employee trained on Excel spreadsheets, for instance, is using a familiar system. McElvain has distributed laptop computers to the field in all six states of operation, and now the corporate office in Denver never has to wait for information.

Be faster than the competition

We know the oil and gas industry is not about the software, it’s about producing oil and gas. So it stands to reason that back office technology is not often a top concern. There are huge companies that use 20-plus year old software because they’re “saving money” or they love their AS/400.

What this means is that the competition with the more nimble companies who have built efficiencies into their upstream processes are going to beat those “old dogs” where it counts, because they can make decisions can be made faster and allow them to react to changing conditions with an “Internet speed” solution.

Every energy company is different, and many were created by acquiring or merging with others. This can result in a company that is actually many more than one: a production company, operating company, land company or even service company – all of these, or more. All of the subsidiaries may have started out with different processes. Perhaps invoicing was done in Peachtree or QuickBooks, thus requiring staff to re-code to allow the overall company can track the data. Some “dashboard” programs claim to be able to pull from a variety of programs to create a hobbled-together single report.

However, the new technology makes that obsolete as well as time-wasteful. All the data, from all the divisions, is now vertical – time, invoices, dozer use, rate schedules, time records, so the system computes billable time – time and resource management can be built into the application as well.

What exactly are you managing?

Even small energy companies are hugely complex. They have the same issues as the major companies with fewer people to help manage them. In fact, there’s generally so much data in the world of the typical oil and gas executive, that what is actually managed on a day-to-day basis is the exceptions in the data – the material that sticks out as either right, wrong or requiring adjustment.

Your technology should let you know what those exceptions are – because those are the issues requiring executive attention on a day-to-day basis. With the new technology these issues become clear immediately and intuitively. Not only that, but new opportunities can appear which might not have been apparent otherwise.

Consider a map of a county in a nearby state where you have a few dozen wells. All the data on those wells is only a couple of mouse-clicks away. Looking them over you see how a lease between well X and well Y might add to your operating efficiencies in ways that only the visualization in front of you makes obvious – but obvious it has suddenly become. Pull up a few more map versions of the same site – the Internet connectivity makes a wide variety of maps available to tie to your data. Look at the options from a variety of angles. It only takes a few minutes to see if this opportunity is really a potential profit-maker.

Surf your data

These are the elements you need to consider when looking for an upstream technology application and services company. Does it:

• Offer truly integrated application software and services?
• Fully service the complex needs of a vertically integrated oil and gas company?
• Translate data into intelligence with the ability to surf the data?
• Introduce native mapping and information visualization as a standard user interface?
• Make technical mapping and reporting available for the non-technical user?

These elements allow you to actually surf your company’s data, to borrow a phrase from the Internet world. A truly intuitive program with logical user orientation lets you surf across the material until you find one of those exceptions that requires attention, and then allows you to drill down, down, down to the specific documents which are scanned in their entirety so you can see what happened, when, and “if and why” you need to do something quickly.

Is time money?

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say the way one spends time is the way one spends money. Is your company spending precious employee time reconciling data or managing and creating interfaces to best of breed solutions which are obsolete by the time they’re finally finished? Or is your energy company moving into the efficiencies that new technology allows?

The oil and gas industry doesn’t wait for anybody. Now executives can have visual, understandable reports about the information they need, immediately – so you don’t have to wait for anybody, either. Do you want the competitive advantage that is now available to maximize your investment? Maybe it is finally time to reach past what oil and gas companies had available to them years ago when they made that decision…

About the author

Kevin E. Schmidt [[email protected]] is president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Enertia Software, a software development and technical services company offering enterprise software solutions and services tailored to the oil and gas industry. Schmidt has more than 20 years of oil and gas industry experience. He holds a business management degree in petroleum land management from the University of Texas-Austin.