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BHP Billiton Petroleum Selects Seven Lakes to Equip Operations with Field Data Capture Application

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Today, we are pleased to announce that BHP Billiton Petroleum has selected our FDG™ mobile solution for its North American field operations to transform the quality of complex data inputs including wells, routes and pumpers. In the current market, oil and gas companies are faced with intense pressure to balance operational expenses and gain control of production costs in the field. With our solution, they are able to take action to proactively optimize field operations by receiving timely, accurate data and insights.

By empowering teams to dynamically change routes based on optimal opex and production goals, BHP Billiton Petroleum’s North American field operations can expect to significantly increase pumper cost efficiency and production control. With this application and focus on collaboration, BHP Billiton is viewing the same reports, improving operations in the field, and reducing the cost of compliance. Their investment in this solution will bring sustainable value to their bottom line and achieve business initiatives.

-For more information, read the full press release here.

Five Powerful Ways IT Transforms Oil & Gas Operations

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Everything in oil & gas operations revolves around data; land documents, reservoir analysis, drilling and completions reports, and financial statements. In the center of it all is the Information Technology (IT) department. With this position, IT has the strong ability to affect the bottom line by enabling operations to maximize production, CAPEX and OPEX. Now is the time for the industry to count on IT to lead the business transformation.

Five Powerful Ways IT Transforms Oil & Gas Operations

1) Capture your organization’s data and equip operations to form meaningful insights and turn that into immediate action. Give control to personnel to take action in the same place they find their insights. Allow all personnel to monitor the health of the business from one source of trusted data, from any location, at any time.

2) Start with a common understanding of data standards with the business. Meet with all divisions in your organization and gain an understanding of what they need to overcome business challenges. Gain trust among IT and production, accounting, drilling and completions to recognize what insights will allow them to make better business decisions. Instill in them the truth, that you will provide a trustworthy and business-driven solution.

3) Deliver simple software that guarantees high user adoption. Give your organization applications that require minimal training and adapt well to their mobile work environment. Operational excellence begins with your leaser operator out in the field, not behind a desk. Give them the ability to instantly log findings into a reliable tool such as an iPad or Windows tablet. With the swipe or tap of a finger an operator can record volume information and well parameters. They then can compare what theoretical production with real-time and identity potential performance gap. With dashboards that paint data visually rather than grids, operations become more proactive with better control over production success.

4) Implement software that must work with all systems. Companies have spent millions of dollars implementing enterprise systems designed to capture, organize and store data securely. They were never truly required to speak with each other. To get the complete value from those systems every new technology investment you make must persistently bridge that gap between siloed systems. Invest in software that delivers consistent, trustable data without changing the way personnel work. This means new software must integrate with source systems, which helps make existing infrastructure and data more useful and meaningful.

5) Invest in action, not just data. Your business is made up of doers who want to self-serve, not wait for data to be reconciled because systems do not talk to each other. New solutions that get them to take action swiftly wins the race. New solutions should already have readymade data models that map specifically to the oil and gas systems. New solutions should display exactly how your business already operates out-of-the-box. Changing and shifting along with your industry needs. Deploy technology that will answer your business questions, “How much did we really spend? Will we make money if we keep that well running? Should we continue production on this particular well?” Focus on key performance indicators meaningful to your personnel, and long lasting value in their action.

IT has the data, now is the time to visualize it in a meaningful way that equips everyone to make smarter business decisions. Take operations to a new level with solutions that provide increased transparency and insights. With the ability to freely see, act and share a common, collaborative goal – operators become difference-makers and bring sustainable value to the bottom line.

Visit us at the NG Oil & Gas Technology CIO Summit

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Visit us at table #1 at the NG Oil & Gas Technology US Summit on June 6th – 8th, 2016 in Austin, Texas!

We’re excited to be attending the event and looking forward to meeting with senior IT decision makers and business leaders from the Oil & Gas industry. We understand the challenge getting different departments to work together across siloed systems to optimize LOE, minimize downtime, monitor vendor expenses and generate a competitive return on your capital investments while maintaining IT standards. Stop by our table #1 to learn how leading IT departments are able to bridge the divide between siloed systems with business value driven analytics and workflows to help your people tackle these day-to-day challenges.

We’d love to learn more about your business and look forward to meeting you at the summit!

Do you have CAPEX Discipline?

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“Use the budgeting process to drive alignment across your organization. While it is easy to look at budgeting purely as a financial exercise, the most important part of the process is using the financial plan as a way to represent the organization’s goals and priorities and to use the planning process to drive alignment across the company on these issues.” -Chip Hazard, General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. This is a powerful concept in today’s commodity market. It’s critical for E&P companies to maintain discipline and do exactly what they budgeted for. This can only be achieved when the entire organization has access to their accounting data.

Is your accounting system good at transaction, but not reporting?
Is Operations able to get reports from the accounting system on their own without having to rely on someone else to pull the data for them?
Is your entire organization viewing the same real time data to make effective and efficient cost saving decisions?

If you’re not able to answer yes to the questions above, it’s time to reassess your budgeting processes. Empower your organization so they can access data quickly. Give them a system where they are able to look at their specific AFEs and costs, easily and instantly.

Take our customer, Willson Beebe, Financial Analyst at Concho Resources, for example, he shared at a recent webinar his experience in turning individuals into informed, aligned and capable decision makers. “Most of my job for the past 5 or 6 years was actually pulling data. I had very little time left for financial analysis or analysis of any type. During the first couple of performance reviews with my boss, he noted, ‘Willson does a great job of pulling data, but needs to spend more time analyzing data.’ This was a huge concern. Now that Concho uses AFE Analytics, most of my job includes showing people how to pull their data. That’s the really neat part for me. I have given the ability for hundreds of people to get their own data, do their own research analysis, which is way more efficient than having one person do it for hundreds of people. It is very user friendly, and was very quickly adopted by multiple users across the business – land guys, drilling guys, completion guys, field guys, office engineers, management, financial analysts. It’s great to have one place to go where anyone can look at their actual spend, field estimates, and budget for 1 or 100 AFEs all in one place.”

Willson recognized an inefficient process that hindered departments across the organization. They weren’t able to see detailed capital expenditures in a timely manner. Understanding the importance of a reliable accounting process, he enabled the entire workforce to view real time data in any modifiable view that’s pertinent to their role. He also redefined expenditure review by giving users access to start at the top of expenses and drill down to the actual invoice. All users are now able to make smarter business decisions that impact the bottom line. “They are able to answer their own questions about actual vs. budget and if their field estimate is trending higher than I expected it to. Being able to hone in on each well and its expenses quickly is a very powerful concept in the today’s commodity market. The more eyes you can put on your AFE expenditures, the more your organization will take action to optimize your CapEx and stay on budget to achieve company goals.

Seven Lakes Technologies Named a Gartner 2016 Cool Vendor in Oil and Gas

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Today, we are pleased to announce that Seven Lakes Technologies has been named a Gartner 2016 Cool Vendor in Oil and Gas. The report identifies technology vendors that have a strong market vision and offer unique and innovative products and services that have a real market impact. Our inclusion in the Cool Vendor report is another independent confirmation that our analytics and workflow software are helping oil and gas producers to drive initiatives around business decisions instead of functional siloes.

Each year, Gartner identifies Cool Vendors in key technology areas and publishes a series of research reports highlighting these innovative vendors and their products. The reports are meant to help organizations filter out hype; hone in on worthwhile innovations, and identify those vendors that are inflection points in market evolution.

We’re proud to be included in the report and to be the first-to-market with highly effective SaaS, cloud-based efficiency tools for the upstream oil & gas sector. Our enterprise-ready software delivers tremendous value and cost savings to large and mid-size companies. Now more than ever, our customers require solutions that allow them to make smart decisions around production, capex and opex to impact the bottom line.

For more information about Seven Lakes Technologies, or to arrange a short demonstration of our solutions, visit our website at https://www.sevenlakes.online. For more information about the Gartner report visit http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/cool-vendors/.

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5 Best Practices of a Production Engineer: Critical Chief of the Oil Field

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Production Engineers own the crucial role of monitoring and evaluating the productivity and efficiency of an oil and gas well. They’re the driving leaders in an oil and gas company that bring departments together to ensure profitable wells. “If you apply even low amounts of effort toward effective engineering habits, such as using tools to help you iterate and validate ideas more quickly, you can earn tremendous dividends.” Edmond Lau author of The Effective Engineer. Through analytic and workflow tools, successful Engineers access data in a consistent and structured manner that catalyze valuable conversations. Learn how leading production engineers are utilizing technology to efficiently use their time and make the best decisions to run profitable wells.

5 Best Practices of a Production Engineer

1. Efficiently view well performance. Be productive with analytic solutions to view information anywhere, anytime. Spend less time searching for well productivity and more time making intelligent, timely decisions for the best business impact. Start your day by viewing downtime reports that are managed by exception and review the largest variance wells very quickly.

2. Have visibility into costs. Drill down to any invoice to review accuracy and correct any misallocations. Ensure that each well is being billed for the right set of work and costs. A Production Engineer from a large Permian Basin Operator diverted a large production cost by using an lease operating expenses analytics tool, “Post deployment, we caught a few overcharges that we wouldn’t have caught if we didn’t have the dashboards. It resulted in about $40K of invoices credited back to us”. With fast and easy access to invoices, you can quickly review the costs against your wells to ensure they are correct which assists in increasing profits from your wells.

3. Perform well downtime reviews daily. Use advanced downtime tools that allow time to focus on reducing downtime and maximizing revenues, versus spending hours and weeks gathering and cleansing data. With the ability to see downtime categories and sub-categories you’re able to choose downtime reasons to go after, based on production loss. Only then can you make actionable insights to improve downtime performance of a single well. A Production Engineer from a large Permian Basin Operator saw a definite trend down in most cost codes of 5-10% and contributed at least a part of that to the tracking ability provided by the dashboards.

4. Analyze and compare well production with the office and your lease operators. Use analytics solutions to access real-time, detailed data about costs, production, and profitability. When the office and field are viewing the same insights, Production Engineers can facilitate more production conversations to guide Lease Operators and make effective decisions in the field. With everyone looking at the same data and plots, you can all speak the same language to make effective operating decisions. There is reason to work in absolutes - worked in absolutes; keep the well open, or shut the well in. Involve more people in creating decision scenarios around what to do if oil prices reach a certain point, or how best to mitigate underperforming wells.

5. Ensure data integrity. Visibility is key to acquire and maintain clean data. Without being able to review your data you can’t find discrepancies to correct. Make the clean-up simple and easy with straightforward graphics in an organized format. “Visibility cures a lot of evils in data integrity. Prior to FDG, field data would be massaged for 2-3 days, then it would go to an analytics engine and there was no ownership in data. With FDG, there was near real time visibility. Our COO found 13 mmboe of salt water from a single well which isn’t possible and we discovered the data quality issues very quickly”.

Strong and trustworthy data visibility allows production engineers to be leaders in their organization to make real-time decisions, driving efficiency. By utilizing technology and focusing on collaboration, the company views the same reports, improves operations in the field, and reduces the cost of compliance.


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