Caesar Systems – helps you ask the right questions
Feature Articles, May  29  2009 (Digital Energy Journal)

- As finances get tighter, the importance of good decision making gets a lot more important. Caesar Systems offers a range of software, training and advisory services to help with all types of oil and gas decision making

Caesar Systems of Houston is developing a range of software tools, training and consultancy services, to help oil and gas companies make decisions.

Victor Koosh, CEO, Caesar Systems

It provides software tools used to understand the risks and opportunities of a situation, training to make better use of decision-making principles and tools. It can also work side-by-side helping companies determine the numerous uncertainties and risks in exploration and production for better decision making. “Our goal is making the complicated simple,” says Mr. Koosh.

“Decision making gets a lot more complicated when you have to make commitments without having good answers to the right questions,” he says. “”If you ask the wrong questions then no tool in the world will make them right.”

The company is seeing good growth in the current economic environment, as people increasingly want to try to understand their businesses at a deeper level. At the time of writing (late April 2009) the company had already booked more business than it did in 2008, both from new clients and existing ones using the service more.

The company has 30 staff, half software developers and half advisors helping people use the software effectively.

The company has been developing tools which can be used in offshore deepwater, as well as enhanced oil recovery, and unconventional oil and gas. “These are growth areas for the E&P industry,” he says.

Companies have often made these kinds of decisions with spreadsheets in the past, but it is hard to incorporate the required knowledge models with all of their variables in a spreadsheet.

“We can consider all the information simultaneously – and what you do when other information is available,” he says. “That’s different from the static spreadsheet approach – that really only considers what you know today and each of those alternatives individually.”

“The software can be used to create dynamic scenarios for production forecasts, expense forecasts and cashflow forecasts, and provide you with metrics to differentiate those forecasts,” he says.

The right questions

The software does not actually tell people what decision to make, but helps provide them with better insight about what is going on, so they can ask the right questions.

“I hate to use the tired word ‘solutions’,” says Mr Koosh. “But basically we’re a problem solving company. We try to help our clients identify the real problems they’re trying to solve.”

“It’s more about enabling people to visualise alternatives, generate insights, and thereby facilitate them to make good decisions,” says Mr Koosh.

“In order for humans to make decisions we must understand our choices. We also have to have a way to differentiate the alternatives,” he says.

“Should we drill or not? When? How many wells? How big a plant or surface facility should we build? When should we use waterflooding, gas injection or other recovery methods?”

When the oil price is low and revenues reduced, decisions have to be made about deferring projects where it is possible. “Understanding that has become critically important,” he says. “We give insights into the right scheduling.”

You can try out different scenarios to see how they would change the overall outcome.

“Say if rig rates multiply by 3, you can model what might happen,” he says. “You can see and identify opportunities that allow you to be successful in those circumstances and also avoid the things that prevent your success.”

You can also model what your competitors might do, and how that might affect things.

For example, if a company has to make decisions about building a whole new plant upfront, or building it in stages over time then they would gain insights about which of those strategies helps them achieve their goals best and why.

A common problem is that people don’t feel they have enough information, and have to make a decision on whether to invest in getting more information – such as through a new seismic survey.

You can identify the uncertainties that the information will help you resolve, and based on the resolution of those uncertainties, how that knowledge would then change your ability to make the decision. Sometimes, the cost of more information is greater than the value of having that additional information.

“They can use the software to find out what they know, what they’d like to know, what they could maybe find out – how much investment would it take to get the knowledge they seek, how would that impact their overall outcomes once they have it,” Koosh said.

Connecting the domains

The important thing is the connections between the different disciplines. “In the traditional way of approaching problems – you break the problem down and you have specialists work on each part of the problem and each specialist brings you their perspective. The challenge is integrating all of those in order to make a decision,” he says.

The financial success of most projects will depend on what happens in the subsurface – and there are very few people with a comprehensive understanding of both the reservoir and finance.

This is something Caesar Systems aims to address. “Our VP of client service is a reservoir engineer with significant finance experience,” he says. “We offer people with knowledge from both domains.”

Of course the oil and gas industry has many different knowledge domain areas, including subsurface, surface, commercial environment and political environment. All of these can make a big impact on the overall success of a project.

“The key is really the knowledge models – whether it’s a subsurface knowledge model, surface knowledge model, drilling knowledge model – they all have to be brought together in order to understand the dependencies and inter-dependencies because that’s where the value lies,” he says.

Helping customers learn

Mr Koosh strongly believes that the more customers are able to use the tools, the better it is for both parties. The more they know, “the more opportunity there will be for us to collaborate on new ways of doing things,” he says.

The company is developing its own training material, including help systems and how-to videos. “That’s an enabler for a client to learn at their own pace, at their own time, how to apply a particular concept when they face a similar situation,” he says.

It has formed a partnership with a Houston company called Decision Frameworks, which offers courses to help with decision making. It was founded by Ellen Coopersmith, a petroleum engineer and decision expert, with offices in Houston, Calgary and Germany.

“By having the software, the class room training and advisory services – you can have the skills to deal with whatever happens,” he says.

Caesar Systems and Decision Frameworks offer a workshop called Project Jumpstart, where companies begin to solve actual problems on a real project. “The client has a real decision problem – and they provide us with a certain amount of information about that decision problem. We go to their offices and prepare that project for their decision-making.”

“In that case – we’re teaching as well as solving simultaneously.”

“Typically it’s something that they’ve tried to solve themselves – they couldn’t solve on their own – or were insufficiently happy with their solution.”

Caesar Systems

<<BACK