Improving information delivery to oil and gas exploration and field development teams Experiences from Shell
Roger Abel, Shell and Paul Cleverley Flare Solutions Limited, First published in Hart s E&P, 2007 Introduction Shell Exploration and Production have global teams working on new business, exploration and field development projects. A review in the business during 2003 found a significant amount of staff time was spent looking for information rather than doing technical work. For hydrocarbon field development projects, there were also opportunities for improvement around the hand-over process, from one team to another, often from subsurface to engineering and from one geographic location to another. When projects were put on hold and then later restarted forming a new team, finding all the relevant definitive documents and data was problematic. Specific business requirements The business wanted a global, not point or region specific solution. New business, exploration and field development wanted the same approach, so the baton could be passed seamlessly from one team to another. Any new system had to cater for both technical professionals and managers, include data & documents (electronic, hardcopy) and processes; internal and external content. Any mass end-user interface had to have a low barrier of entry, in its simplest form it had to be intuitive to use without training. The Information Management Landscape A number of Global Information Management (IM) improvement projects were initiated to address these business issues (and others), to raise the game with respect to IM. Building a skill-pool of competent IM professionals internally was critical, as well as providing more intimate services to help business teams. Targeted large scale data quality improvement initiatives were combined with document scanning projects to digitize selected legacy hardcopy material going back 50 years. Information Management Technology Landscape For high precision structured search using business metadata, the web-based E&P Catalog product from Flare Solutions was used. The product was also deployed for high precision publishing & tracking of work products, integrating with the Microsoft desktop and OpenText Livelink Electronic Document Management System (EDMS). The product provides a metadata layer and end-user graphical user interface to connect and compliment a company s existing information sources. This compliments the full text search engine used by the business, which gives high recall of information but does not always enable staff to easily locate the specific information they need in their project or domain context. The product was also integrated with existing data query and map systems (Geographical Information Systems (GIS)), so content could be found spatially. Cataloguing philosophy The Philosophy is high grading information that needs to be kept for the long term. Managing the key deliverables/ snapshots and supporting material at every step of the business process is the challenge. Care was taken not to try and boil the ocean, focusing on quick wins. Uniquely, all content including data (views of data in underlying relational databases), digital application archives, physical items, documents, wellfiles, maps, processes, even people were catalogued! Each treated in the same way, using the same metadata and attributes for a holistic high precision view of what exists. Content is published into the metadata catalogue through 2 main routes. Firstly, E&P technical and support staff add keywords from structured lists to information items. Secondly, through automated and manual content uploads (using web services, via a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach) from internal repositories and archives. This includes external information that the business is entitled to and metadata on what is available to buy. E&P Taxonomy The backbone of the approach is the E&P Taxonomy used by the product, which contains hundreds of thousands of technical and business terms, aliases and relationships. This allows manual and automatic tagging of information to aid information retrieval, understanding the overall E&P business. Taking a simple geological example, if the system finds the term glauconite in the original metadata (perhaps a legacy library index), it understands this is a mica, a mineral, discipline mineralogy and usually indicative of marine continental shelf depositional environments. Automatically adding these types of relationships enables staff to discover relevant information that they otherwise would miss.
High Precision Structured Search Staff can search for information via 4 main methods (or combinations) to slice and dice the corporate memory (Figure 1). The first three focus on I know what I want searches, the fourth is for a serendipitous browsing approach I am not sure what I want. Fig.1 Screenshots of the product interface used for searching. Connection to map systems also allows spatial searching. 1. Type in a term and press <search>. This gives a high precision list back of what exists within the business and from external sources, this mode is similar to a typical search engine. 2. Pick terms off structured pick lists, for example well, field name, project name, product type (e.g. well proposal, pressure data). Pick lists contextually filter as you select items, narrowing down choices automatically. These can be combined with the bibliographic metadata (author, owner, published date etc) similar to a library way of searching. Particularly useful if you know exactly what you want, i.e. Show me VAR2 outputs for the Amethyst project or Show me Field Development Plans (FDP) submitted for Amber Cluster Development over the past 4 years or After Action Reviews (AAR) for Nigerian projects at Phase III. 3. Personalized saved searches, dynamic folder structures where the same item can appear in different folders (normal folder structures only allow a single hierarchical representation to organize information it s impossible to satisfy everyone!). Saved searches can be particularly useful for Wellfiles, where many disciplines want their view on the information. Similar to
Windows Explorer navigation. 4. Graphical search results distribution across the E&P Taxonomy (BrightSky). The user can interactively drill down, clicking on a cell at anytime to perform a high precision search. For the first time, this enables staff to graphically navigate results lists to see what exists against an E&P Taxonomy. This includes internal content and external information (including Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE), I.H.S. Energy, Wood Mackenzie, Deloitte, University of Utah (EGI), Tellus Robertsons etc). High Precision Publishing One of the key elements of publishing is via a process template. The product contains the best practice for the Opportunity Realisation Process (ORP) in the business. This contains the steps for field development, with explicit steps for key deliverables ensuring a business audit trail with approvals from the various boards for compliance. The system acts like a publishing assistant, containing pre-defined keywords from the E&P taxonomy reducing the burden on the technical professional and manager. The organization of information from a project perspective allows the team to easily find definitive documents and supporting information, whilst also allowing information to be found through general searching. Interactive graphical views dashboards allow drill down by date, status, process and project (Figure 2). Fig 2. Screenshots showing the process structure. By clicking on the appropriate step (containing pre-defined attributes), staff can publish documents, which are automatically put into safe areas of the company s document system. Results Since going live in Shell in mid 2005, over 4,000 staff are using the system in 4 continents. The catalogue contains over 1.8Million items today. An independent end-user survey during 2006 indicated it had contributed to a 50% reduction in the time spent by staff looking for information in the business. This equates to tens of millions of dollars in efficiency savings. In addition, new information discovery using the system has directly led to the identification of new plays and potential revenue generation. Global roll-out to the top 70 field development projects in Shell is still ongoing (as are awareness campaigns in exploration), however early signs on recent hand-overs already indicate significant improvements are being made.
About Flare Flare provides information management consulting, software solutions and related services to the E&P industry. Formed in 1998 by people with a background in geoscience and petroleum engineering Flare brings extensive industry experience gained at management, operations and technical levels, both within oil companies and the E&P service sector. The Flare team has developed consulting and services based on a practical, holistic approach to managing knowledge, information and data that focuses on real business needs. The same thinking is encapsulated within Flare s portfolio of software solutions. These include the Catalog for publishing and finding information, Tracker for organising deliverables and Cortex for classification and text analytics. These are all underpinned by Flare s comprehensive Taxonomies. We also have a range of specialised modules, including Emergency Response, Exploration Opportunity Manager and Wellfile. Since its formation Flare has worked on a broad range of projects with E&P organizations around the world and has gained a reputation for excellence and innovation. Engagements have ranged from information management strategy development, through data and information cleanup projects to software implementations and associated change management. Flare has worked with a wide range of organizations from small independents to large multinational oil companies as well as governments, services organizations and industry groups. Flare Solutions Limited Europe: Tel: +44 203 397 7766 Fax: +44 8704 602 543 North America: Tel: +1 403 932 4597 E-mail: enquiries@flare-solutions.com