Flare – award for cataloguing oil and gas information
Feature Articles, May  29  2009 (Digital Energy Journal)

- UK company Flare Solutions, which helps oil and gas companies catalogue their information so they can easily find it, has won the UK Queen’s Award for Enterprise – Innovation for 2009

UK company Flare Solutions, which provides software and services to help oil and gas companies catalogue their data and information, has been awarded the UK Queen’s Award for Enterprise: Innovation 2009.

Awarded by the UK government, it is claimed to be “UK's most prestigious awards for business performance”. The innovation award was given to 49 companies in 2009, including Flare. There are also award categories for international trade and sustainable development.

In December 2006, Flare also won a British Computer Society European Knowledge Management Project Award for its deployment of the E&P Catalog at Shell.

The company has a simple aim – of helping companies manage their information – and the most important tool is a directory of what documents, data and physical items (like cores and fluids) the company has. It makes software to tag and catalogue all the information in a company, and make it easy to find.

The catalogue is an independent software system to the information itself - think of it like a library file index system for books.

The software can be used for managing all kinds of documents, data sets and physical assets created by diverse projects such as field development, regulatory approval, HSE, and well delivery. It can be also be used for indexing reservoir models or seismic projects.

Flare has been in business for over 10 years and still follows the same ‘holistic’ vision– helping people better manage their information by breaking down the data-document-hardcopy barriers. Now its customers include BP, Shell and BG, Nexen, GDF SUEZ, Scottish and Southern Energy.

The company increased sales 13 per cent in 2008 over 2007, and grew its profits 18 per cent.

Unusually, it has just 10 employees, operating a global business out of their own homes.

Different people – different routes

The biggest challenge Flare aims to solve is the fact that different people in a company seek information in different ways and categorise it in different ways – although they are all using the same information.

As a simple example, consider a health and safety guideline. The same document is seen very differently by a health and safety manager, sending the same guideline out to different assets, as by an asset manager, who has to deal with many different guidelines, not only those , about health and safety.

Or consider a company lawyer would want to see all the regulatory approval documents in the company. An environmental manager would want to see all the environmental records. A reservoir engineer would want to see approvals around production consent and an asset manager is only interested in approval records about his asset. Yet they can all looking for the same document.

When people look for information, they expect it to be sorted in a way similarly to how they sort it in their heads – but different people sort out the same information differently.

This is the limitation of organising documents into folders - people in different roles would expect a different way of finding their documents, so you could never have a folder

system which works well for everybody.

Glenn Mansfied, director of Flare Solutions

“We have a bunch of specialists who all need to be able to share a general language,” says Mr Mansfield. “It is a hugely difficult problem.”

If a document contains a specific code number or text, then finding the document is easy, no matter which angle you are coming from, even looking for it on the entire internet, using a keyword search.

But oil and gas people rarely know what they are looking for to this level of detail. And even if they do, the industry doesn’t necessarily use the same code numbers all the time for the same thing.

Even something as simple as a well name can be stored differently by different people. The well planners originally saw it as a target and gave it a (or multiple) target name. The drillers saw it as a slot on their drilling schedules and gave it a slot name. Geoscientists will use a name more in line with the regulatory name, and operations staff will have a short name. They all have a different name for the same well.

Many oil and gas companies are installing search engines to try to find the right information, because they can see how well Google works. “But that alone does not fix the problem,” says Mr Mansfield.

Search engines are fine for finding a list of pages roughly related to something – but not so good if you must find a specific document, particularly if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for, or don’t know any keywords or numbers which are only included on that document.

To illustrate the point, he suggests, try putting the same search term in two different search engines – and see how many of the same web pages turn up in the first page of results on each of them. A recent study by Dogpile and researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University found that the ovelap was a 1.1% on average for a given query, suggesting that each of the four major search engines has a unique voice. Just how unique are the results on each engine?

“This has been a pitfall of many (other) systems, in that you need to know exactly the right question to ask in order to find the information. The E&P Catalog helps users find information from loosely based questions,” says director Glenn Mansfield.

The Flare catalogue - reach the same information via different routes

So Flare has developed a structure where the same document can be found by following different drill-down routes, or ‘funnels’.

So, for example, a well test report for a specific well 110/2-1 could be found by searching through different routes: information type>well test>110/2-1, product type>well files> well test analysis>110/2-1, discipline>petroleum engineering,110/2-1.

The latest version of the software has free text searching functionality which can work in combination with hierarchical searching. This is useful when you have a rough idea of what you are looking for and where it is (but don’t want to have to choose between searching your entire archive for certain search terms and working out exactly where the information is). “You can make a general search - and you can home in and be more precise,” he says.

The catalogue also understands asset relationships (which wells are in which field, which fields are in which licenses and so on), to help bring up documents about wells or assets in the region, even if the documents don’t contain any search terms which were typed in.

Document structure

In order to build such a system, the computer system has to have a thorough understanding of the different document types the industry uses, and how they fit together.

Luckily, you don’t have to build up a structure from scratch for every single client – once you’ve done it for one oil company, most of it will work for another one, because they are fairly similar.

Every business process has standard documents, files or archives which are created at various project stages – the challenge is to help people find the information they are looking for.

For example, many oil companies have “stage gates” where they decide if a project goes further, and they gather certain information at each one.

“We understand that certain information is linked to specific processes - either used or created by them”,, says Mr Camden. “You find this in any business - there are standard things that happen.”

Publishing

One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that the catalogue system knows exactly what all the information is, when new information is being created all the time.

The computer system ultimately needs information to be tagged, or labelled, to say what kind of information it contain, and what it relates to.

There are two ways of doing this – doing it automatically or asking people to do it themselves, and both of these methods have their limitations.

The easiest system would be for employees to be asked to complete tags for every new document they create.

“Is it too much to ask – if you spend 3 weeks writing a report, you spend 2 minutes saying what it is (publishing) so other people can find it?” asks Mr Mansfield.

A common complaint is that people don’t have time. “One person said to me, what is the point of all this effort – when no-one has asked to see the study I wrote,” says Mr Mansfield.

“I said to him, if you haven’t published it properly, who knows you’ve written it?”

The irony is that if the same oil and gas employee was selling his garden furniture on eBay, he would certainly spent a few minutes checking that it was correctly filed under garden furniture, he reckons.

If the average oil and gas employee was selling his garden furniture on eBay, he’d take the effort to catalogue it correctly, says Glenn Mansfield, director of Flare Solutions. So why is it so hard to persuade people to catalogue their oil and gas documents correctly?

eBay even manages to have a financial penalty for incorrectly filing your sales – there are online services which scan the whole of eBay looking for items which are incorrectly filed, which buyers like because they will probably get a better price for an item which less people are chasing. The result is that most of the time, “sellers make the effort to tag things properly,” he says.

There are also plenty of rewards for keeping things organised, but unfortunately the rewards don’t often come directly to the person doing the organising, so the person who needs to get more organised does not have much incentive to do it. You can probably think of many other examples of this problem yourself.

Flare aims to make it very easy to tag something in the catalogue (it calls it ‘publishing’) with simple drop down lists and tick boxes which someone fills in to say what kind of document it is.

For text documents, users are asked to select tag words which apply to it from a drop down list, rather than write their own tags. “We say, you can’t make up keywords,” says Mr Camden. “We’ll give you a pre-defined list.”. Alternative names (synonyms or aliases) and examples give users flexibility.

Another way to help takes us back to the processes – since we often know the major information that will be created we can set up pre-defined lists of ‘things to publish’.

A company annual report is a well-known product and most of its tags can be pre-defined. So a user, for example, will only need to add 3 tags – the published date, the author and possibly a title.

However, a more technical product, such as a well test analysis report on a North Sea well will always require more tagging to describe it properly.

If people can’t be persuaded to tag their own work, another option is for the software to tag it automatically. Flare has developed tools which can do this,

This can be useful when loading pre-existing content into the E&P Catalog. Whilst not as accurate as manual tagging it offers a practical approach where large information sets are concerned.

Ontology

Over the past 10 years, Flare has been gradually building and perfecting its ontology of oil and gas terms. An ontology is a list of terms which are related to one another. So for example, it shows that a drill stem test or DST is a type of well test.

The ontology includes how documents relate to one another (hierarchies). For example, it shows that a depositional environment map is a geological evaluation and that it is related to play analysis”.

The ontology is fed into the cataloguing system, so it can quickly work out which documents relate to others, or what documents someone might want if they type in a certain search term.

“It’s a model of how things are, how they relate,” he says. “We know things about formation damage are related to overpressure drilling. No search engine in the world will know that relationship.”

“We are still developing the ontology,” says Mr Mansfield. “We, and the E&P Catalog, are constantly learning.”

The ontology is made available under license to other users, and a simplified taxanomic version has been supplied free of charge to standards organisation Energistics.

Flare Solutions

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