What are the Benefits of a Totally Integrated Digital Planning and Execution package?

When planning and executing a well intervention, it’s crucial to do the right thing at the right time. You need to plan the operation in detail and understand the limits and consequences of the things you do.

New software tools and a more data-driven approach to managing oil and gas operations have enabled companies to improve collaboration during planning and operations, learn important lessons, capture best practices, and integrate data streams.

In this blog article, we will look at what a totally integrated digital planning package is, what the benefits are, and what you need to consider when selecting a digital solution.

What is a totally integrated digital planning package?

A totally integrated digital planning package should contain these three methodologies for intervention planning:

Data-Driven Intervention Planning

Many oil and gas wells have long and complicated histories. A systematic approach to capturing and using well intervention data from earlier rounds of interventions can allow companies to easily replicate successful strategies and reap the benefits over the lifetime of an asset. Bringing data and analytical tools into one integrated package is the first step towards optimizing performance in this critical area.

The Digitalization of Work Processes

A full digital solution with a workflow tool embedded, could be considered to both save time and avoid human error. Workflows are useful for ensuring that important processes are done the right way every time.

The paper trail with traditional planning is often time-consuming to utilize. This can now be replaced with a digital trail that clearly shows the record of decisions, actions taken as well as the entire timeline for efficient retrospective. This makes it possible for teams to automate a significant amount of the work, such as automated approvals and notifications.

A Collaborative End-to-End Solution

Digital collaboration is the practice of people working together through online means such as software-as-a-solution (SaaS) platforms. Instead of teams only communicating and working together in person, they are able to rely on digital tools to address many of their collaborative needs.

Communication, project/task management, efficient file sharing, auditability, access privileges and security are all key for collaboration.

Read more: Can Well Intervention Be Digitalized?

What are the benefits?

Investing in a totally integrated digital planning/execution package has a cost, but the potential benefits of this digitalization of interventions are so huge that the cost compared to benefits is very low. Let’s have a look at what benefits come with having a total solution:

Consistent plans: A full digital solution with a workflow tool embedded could save time and avoid human error. A workflow defines the steps involved in the process of getting work done and are useful for ensuring that important processes are done the right way every time.

Automation: By encouraging standardization, a digital solution lays the foundation for automation of manual tasks, thereby reducing the resources required in the whole process. This results in lower operating costs and faster return on investments from less downtime on the existing wells in production.

Clearer communication: In large, global organizations with high headcount and various teams, positioned at different locations, people don’t necessarily have a good way of capturing or communicating what they have been doing and what experiences they have collected.

A software solution can manage standard operating procedures and make sure that all relevant information is updated continuously and is accessible to everyone everywhere. This leads to higher success rates, lower operational times, and consequently, large cost savings.

Efficient retrospective: One of the most valuable benefits from having a digital solution is being able to learn from previous experiences. Digitalizing operations easily let you evaluate what happened, if the operation was successful, and why.

Say you have an operation with 100 smaller tasks. When doing a similar operation in the future, you can evaluate these 100 tasks, and modify them to be even more efficient and successful the next time.

Making a mistake during production can be catastrophic. Worst case can be very costly not just to fix, but also to get production flowing from that well again. Having a digital system that capture data from every intervention you do in every well is extremely valuable and instantly gives insights into how to best carry out jobs. Decisions are made on accurate and more reliable information, leading to improved performance as mistakes are prevented. Consequently, operating expenditures are reduced, as NPT and ILT are minimized.

Read more: Top Three Methods to Improve Intervention Planning

What do you need to consider before choosing?

Has reading the benefits of a totally integrated digital planning package made you think about moving to a digital solution? Before you select a digital platform, we recommend that you have a look at these questions:

• Should I own my digital solution or rely on a service company?
• Is it open? Make sure that any solution you are considering will let you create a two-way data flow.
• Does the solution support industry standards?
• Is it future proof?
• Is it a proven solution and does it have a track record?
• Does it have functionality for comparing plan data and field data?

Conclusion

The oil and gas industry is moving forward, and digitalization is a vital part of this evolution. Investing in a totally integrated digital planning/execution package where you integrate the knowledge, competence and learnings into a domain that benefits all stakeholders is a natural step in how oil and service companies move towards digitalization.

We are moving towards using heavy processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning when doing well interventions. This requires big data sets, and the only way to achieve that is to have a structured way to gather and store the data. You need a permanent system to do this.