OT in Conventional Oil and Gas – Work Flows, Data, Customization, Configuration, and Integration
We assisted a client in saving millions in annual recurring OPEX, directly “moving the needle” on their income statement, lowering their lifting costs, and contributing to increasing free cash flow. We did this by optimizing their daily operational and operational engineering work flows, modeling and consolidating their OT data, and then designing, building and implementing a Custom OT Platform, to manage their new work flow efficiencies, and feed their on going BI dashboard, reporting, and analytics solution.
I frequently get challenged and asked WHY DO WE NEED A CUSTOM OT SOLUTION?
Even with the popularity in open source tools, easy access to programming and development tools and training, growing interest in teaching “everyone how to code”, and scripting essentially being a must have skill to support all existing technology, custom development has a bad reputation, or is simply “not preferred”.
We are first and foremost an agnostic management consulting group. Our focus is to help companies optimize their work flows, to achieve Executive Goals, such as lowering OPEX, reducing downtime, optimizing your production, facilities, and wells, and strengthening your sustainability and safety programs.
We see things as ROI driven. Not all solutions need technology, but ALL WORKFLOWS need an OT SOLUTION ARCHITECT.
We provide the service to not only review your work flows, optimize them, and prioritize executing them, but we will help you build a road map to assure as you incrementally put your new optimized work flows into operation. We will assure you have an OT road map, and plan to assure field automation, third party cloud based automation, field communications, cyber security, data, and applications are all integrated, and driving the highest possible ROI, with out “closing any doors”.
Back to “Why a customized solution?”
Even though conventional oil and gas work flows and most field automation and technology are fairly similar at a tactical perspective, why is there not an “off the shelf OT Platform I can buy?”.
There is no solution like that available because even though work flows at a high level are similar, the details of how your company needs to work is unique to: your organizational structure, your culture, the level of acceptance to significant change, the diversity of the automation you have on the ground, the diversity of automation you have in cloud systems, your field communications, and your data integration requirements and maturity.
All of this compromises your current “state of OT readiness and maturity”. The higher this state is, the more you can save in recurring annual OPEX and the faster you can adapt and continue to implement work flow optimizations.
The key to massive OPEX savings is to shift to DIRECTED WORK. Making sure you have staff reviewing current operating state and then scheduling work to assure the right work is being done, by the right resource, at the right time, safely and efficiently.
This is done by reviewing and optimizing your work flows, then consolidating all your field data, removing all paper, putting in place near real time data and system integrations, and assuring the automation in your field, your operators, and work schedulers always have the information they need to do their jobs. No searching, no hunting, no cleaning, just focusing on the work!
That is the beauty of data consolidation! Everyone sees the same data at the same time, real time!
What are the key pieces to make this happen?
An OT Mobile App your field operators spend their day in to review and execute their directed work, based on your chosen optimized work flows, and use it for all note taking, field data capture, and well/facility reference material. And using instant FEEDBACK, they maintain and provide real time intelligence to and from their remote work schedulers and work partners; continually learning and tuning their work flows.
The remote work schedulers and work partners use a secure cloud based web application, in constant real time communications with the field operators, and the mobile app and web app are only using the consolidated OT Data Warehouse/Enterprise Historian, assuring everyone is looking at the same truth, and creating the single source of truth and authority, to keep everything in a constant learning mode and optimizing, and creating a base for machine learning and AI analysis. This creates a level of transparency you can leverage going forwards and an on-going foundation for continuous improvement.
The need for customization is largely driven not from “just wanting to custom program and development” but from assuring each company gets the specific work flows, user interfaces, automation integrations, and data integrations they need to achieve MAXIMUM SAVINGS and EFFICIENCY and fit their tolerance of change.
A very intelligent friend of mine repeated to me many times on a project where we kept “finding surprises”, the key to tight integration, capturing very high ROIs and optimization levels, is to pay attention to the fact that “the devil is in the detail”; and that is why customization is key.
I’m pretty sure Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla all “pay attention to the details” and each company has and carries their own details and changes in regulation and events like merger and acquisitions can generate hundreds of new details over night.
Each company has a different culture, different automation already invested in and in operations, different methods of working, different formations, geography, and so on … these are all relevant details.
You can achieve a portion of these savings with an off the shelf solution, that does not address significant details, but can those solutions integrate all your existing automation and technology? Can they consolidate your field data into an enterprise historian and OT Data Warehouse?
What are they going to charge you? Time and materials for customization? Licensing? Support? Are you going to pay some cost per month per user or per facility for ever? And then another 15 to 25% annually for support? Will you be “held hostage” waiting for work flow and interface changes while you share a solution with other customers who have to agree or not be impacted by your changes? Are you ok waiting months and years for that?
Or would you prefer to pay time and materials on a project basis, and when you have optimized enough or captured enough ROI or wanted to pause you could stop those costs? And not have an going set of per month costs for usage? Would you like to get your changes done in a monthly release cycle and not have to discuss those changes with anyone but your own company? Would you like a support contract that charges you only for the support you ask for so you can see the real support cost?
If so, contact me at shane.yamkowy@qtltd.ca for a meeting and check out our web site at www.qt-ot.com, we would enjoy having a chat!
Contact us at
shane.yamkowy@qtltd.ca or check out our web site at www.qt-ot.com
