Upstream - E&P

Geology and Exploration

• How can we analyze production growth rates across different regions over the past years?
• How do our field costs and booked costs compare against each other and against the budget?
• Which locations contribute significantly to the production stream?
• Can we identify under-performing locations and investigate the contributing factors?
• Is our exploration productivity in line with company objectives? Has our overall well count increased?
• Can we perform comprehensive financial analysis and explore the impact of management actions on the organization’s financial results?
• What is the impact of CAPEX spending on current and future production levels?

Land Management

• Upstream Oil and Gas executives require a robust land management system in order to efficiently manage the organization’s lease and land inventory. In addition, a strong Land Management Analytics solution is needed to accurately monitor and track ownership, lease interest, lease records and contract information.

  Visual BI’s Oil and Gas Analytics solution includes predetermined dashboards and views for Land Management that leverage industry best practices and empower executives with the ability to:

  • Proactively monitor capital expenditures related to land management activities
  • Maintain departmental operating budgets, and ensure alignment with business objectives and adherence to fiscal requirements
  • Track acreage distribution and well count trends to facilitate resource management decisions
  • Identify locations to scale up and deploy resources
  • Support acquisitions or dispositions of property and facilitate title reviews
  • Maximize asset value, identify undeveloped properties and perform detailed cost vs benefits analysis
  • Initiate acquisition of right-of-way for road and pipelines to support commencement of drilling operations
  • Reduce lease expenses and re-negotiate contracts while promoting strong prospect relationship
  • Maximize profitability by performing detailed analysis on calculating Working interest (WI), Royalty Interest(RI), Overriding Royalty interest(ORRI), and Net Revenue Interest (NRI)
  • Initiate, promote, negotiate, and finalize joint development agreements with co-ventures.
  • Analyze risk and lease management strategies by evaluating regions with low and high agreements vs prospect ratio
  • Analyze and manage impact of existing contracts/agreements and regulatory requirements on drilling and production operations
  • Access custom Dashboard and Reporting features with Quorum Land Systems using custom universe on top of Quorum to generate analysis reports

  In addition to facilitating the above, our Land Analytics solution for Oil and Gas provides real-time views of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to answer critical business questions such as the following:

  • How many lease agreements have been signed so far?
  • What are our total lease expenses? How are these expenses split across different property statuses? Which locations have the most number of undeveloped acreage?
  • What is the overall financial impact of retaining these properties? Can we justify these expenses and their long term prospects?
  • How many wells have been deployed so far?
  • How can we analyze yearly trends in the total number of agreements and evaluate the performance of our lease record management process?
  • Can we analyze acreage distribution across the organization by year and state?
  • What is the cumulative state wise trend in well count, agreements and the total number of prospects?
  • How many leases are expected to expire in the next few months in a state/prospect?
  • Which landman is responsible to collect producing well’s unbilled amount ?

Operations

Volatile economy, uncertain demand and increasing costs have made oil and gas companies strive for innovations in technology and operations to sustain growth and profitability. Upstream organizations increasingly look to adopt the concept of digital oil fields (Smart Field or i-Field), where technology solutions are deployed across all operations to optimize hydrocarbon production, integrate oilfield operations and maximize asset utilization. These solutions facilitate an Integrated Operations Management function and provide a holistic view of all operations along with deep insights of the past and present condition of productive assets. They provide real time visibility into operational KPIs that help monitor asset performance and discover untapped opportunities.

Visual BI’s Upstream Operations Management analytic solution offers interactive dashboards that leverage industry leading metric frameworks to address critical business needs and provide business benefits such as:

• Enterprise-wide Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for managing the asset portfolio, asset performance, capital projects and maintenance.
• Optimized asset utilization by integrating data from interrelated processes and systems.
• Analytics-driven cost controlling processes to reduce costs, balance trade-offs and optimize profitability
• Proactive response to operational anomalies by monitoring trends and performance indicators across the enterprise
• Comprehensive view of the production network to quickly respond to short term and long term maintenance issues
• Intelligent scheduling of workover activities to reduced downtime and loss of production
• Efficient planning and accurate forecasting functions that access future projections and perform top-down and bottom-up what-if analyses
• Increased preparedness and faster response to potential changes in the market especially during times of market volatility
• Insights into asset behavior that identifies performance gaps
• Operational excellence through the convergence of production, maintenance, engineering and planning business processes

In addition to addressing the business needs listed above, our Operations Analytics solution for Oil and Gas provides answers to critical business questions such as the following:

Reserves, DD&A

• New reserve discoveries may not be produced for many years. The portion of reserves sold annually from a well or field is typically small compared to the remaining reserves. How do the reserve volumes impact the financial performance of the company? Reserves are considered a long term asset, so how do we place them on balance sheet? Reserve information is reported in the unaudited supplemental information in the annual report. Information is typically presented at a summary level by country or continent. All of the net capitalized costs associated with a property are its Book Value. Book value is not fair market value, and it is not the value from the reserve report (unless it has to be written down – more on that later). Each year, the book value needs to be adjusted to account for the value that is lost when oil and gas is produced. The process by which the book value is adjusted to reflect the removal of some portion of the reserves through production, and the usage of the necessary equipment, is called Depreciation, Depletion, and Amortization.

  • Depreciation is the reduction to the book value of the equipment as it is used up / wears out.
  • Depletion is the reduction of the book value of the mineral assets as they are removed from the reservoir.
  • Amortization is the process of making these adjustments over time.
  • DD&A is a “non-cash” item.

  The Property department in any Oil & Gas business always struggles with gaining a foothold around information management in SAP DD&A is at the core of their struggles.

  • Large volume of manually constructed reports for periodic, Q and K reporting
  • Highly complex data structures limit access
  • Scattered Information and downloaded data volume from ECC tables are very huge
  • Tremendous amount of man hours involved in report creation and compilation

  Dashboards facilitate the easy organization of this data as well as keeps the executives up-to-date with the daily status of their finances, build formatted reports for statutory reporting, facilitate analysis on DD&A and Property data

   

   Type Curves:

  • Type Curves analysis is used extensively by the Resource Development department of any modern upstream Oil & Gas company to predict the future production of to-be-drilled wells based on the existing production of a property.
  • Engineers use specialized applications to derive the type curves data for a property utilizing various geological, economical & operational variables.
  • Visual BI’s chief focus is to cleanse, cluster and mine these business critical data and subsequently present it in a clear and crisp manner.
  • Time and again Type Curve dashboards have proved to be highly effective in boosting investor confidence as they are capable of predicting the future return on investments with an incredible degree of precision.

Supply Chain

Visual BI’s Upstream Supply Chain analytic solution offers interactive dashboards that leverage industry leading metric frameworks to address critical business needs and provide business benefits such as:

• Enterprise-wide Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for managing the asset portfolio, asset performance, capital projects and maintenance.
• Comprehensive view of the production network to quickly respond to short term and long term maintenance issues.
• Increased preparedness and faster response to potential changes in the market especially during times of market volatility

In addition to addressing the business needs listed above, our Supply Chain Analytic solution for Oil and Gas provides answers to critical business questions such as the following:

• How can we ensure optimal supply chain processes to reduce inventories and run outs?
• How is our daily and monthly performance on ending stock volumes and days in tank?

Finance and Accounting  

Uncertain market, ever-changing regulations and volatile outlook are driving Oil and Gas Industry CFOs and financial executives to embrace innovative financial management processes and practices. In addition, they are increasingly turning to robust financial analytics solutions  that can accommodate the company’s expanding asset portfolio, provide cross-functional integration, eliminate redundant functionalities and deliver timely and actionable intelligence to enable the enterprise  scale up to market demands, reduce exploration costs, mitigate financial risks and adjust capital structure while preserving a competitive outlook and flexibility to pursue future growth opportunities. Visual BI’s Oil and Gas Financial Management Analytics solution offers a comprehensive framework to address critical business needs and facilitates the following:

• Realize financial objectives and create sustainable value for stakeholders
• Execute optimal organization strategies by tracking, monitoring and forecasting financial performance across the enterprise
• Increase visibility and control of capital portfolios and projects to prevent CAPEX budget overruns
• Adopt powerful financial planning and predictive analysis capabilities to simulate future scenarios
• Analyse the impact of operational and financial metrics on the organization’s income statement
• Achieve greater insight and control over liquidity and cash management processes
• Implement real-time reporting on transactional processes for increased efficiency and effectiveness
• Align asset management goals and objectives with organizational metrics to reduce variance between Lease operating expenses (LOE) budget and actual costs
• Maximize return on capital, profitability and shareholder value by managing capital investments and related capital and operating expenditures
• Ensure regulatory compliance and implement effective risk management processes

HR & Legal Administration 

Recent high profile incidents in the oil and gas industry have forced companies to place increased emphasis and priority on environment health and safety (EHS). The best run organizations in this industry go beyond established procedures to proactively manage operational risks while preserving structural and mechanical integrity of assets. For effective management of EHS, processes must be established to promote enhanced corporate sustainability and visibility across all safety and health parameters throughout the enterprise. This would help executives and managers actively monitor key risk indicators, ensure regulatory compliance, reduce operating costs and improve asset availability.

Oil and Gas industry executives increasingly lean towards business intelligence analytics solution to answer questions such as the following: