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Better ways to work with production data, by CGI

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Companies are looking to do more and more with their production data - which means that the systems to gather, manage and share it need to be increasingly sophisticated, says Susan Macleod of CGI

Companies already have a lot of tools they use to manage production from day to day, typically spreadsheets and logbooks, says Susan Macleod, Manufacturing & Industry Client Director with CGI.

But they are looking to do more and more with it, which means that systems need to be increasingly sophisticated.

She was speaking at the April 2013 Digital Energy Journal Stavanger conference ''doing more with production data''.

''Oil and gas companies are under pressure to make faster and faster decisions'', she said. 20 years ago we made a decision every year, next it''s every quarter, then it''s every month, now it''s every day. So everything is about the real time, doing it as fast as possible, and the problem becomes just how much data we can intelligently consume.

Storage is only one of many challenges, but the real challenge is making sure you get the most value out of the data you are collecting. I''Is it shared with all of the right people, and is it easy to find when needed?'' she said rhetorically.

Companies are collecting larger and larger volumes of real time data and in trying to make sense of it all, they are regularly developing and running new reports. It is collected in a variety of different tools and stored in different formats on different systems and networks, including paper and microfiche. Some of it you might not need to find again for years, but when you do it needs to be quickly available to the person who needs it.

''The volumes are getting so big that we just talk about data now, we can no longer call what we gather information,'' she said Data in its own right has value even basic surveillance and analysis can provide trending and more importantly help us understand what problem we want to solve.

There is still a big challenge capturing data in the field, including collecting, compiling, reporting and storing the data, without a lot of manual work. ''Data integration is key, and that''s what we, as consumers of information, are all struggling with,'' she said.

License 2 Share

The Stavanger based E&P Information Management Association (EPIM), together with CGI, have developed License 2 Share, a tool to enable production data to be shared with the right joint venture partners, including daily and monthly production reports and drilling reports.

You can create and remove access to the data for different individuals, for when the joint ventures start and stop.

The software can be used to manage the documentation required for the joint venture, including legal contracts and the day to day operational reporting as appropriate. It can also manage data for the life of the joint venture, which could be over 25 years or more. Data is stored in the cloud for the life of the joint venture.

The software is widely used in Norway, but is now seeing growing take-up in UK, Germany, Netherlands and interest is being shown in South America, she said. ''It is becoming a very useful tool.''

Internal data management

To help analyse the data internally, CGI has been working on software that can run in the field or in the office, to do quick analysis of the data.

You can also work with different types of tools - because most people have their favourites - and still be able to access data and information across the organisation using semantic search capabilities.
''So there are lot and lots of different things that become interchangeable as long as it is there somewhere on that connected network,'' she said.

There are tools with in the capability that bring in elements of social networking to assist in getting a better understanding of the production data across communities of experts and can even provide sentiment analysis.

Companies are developing more distributed data storage architecture, where data can be stored close to where it is gathered and the database interrogated from there, rather than uploading it all into a central repository.

You can watch the video of the conference:
http://www.digitalenergyjournal.com/video/ 667.aspx



Associated Companies
» CGI


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