Many petroleum engineers are failing to utilise to their fullest the powerful features within Schlumberger’s leading Oilfield Manager (OFM) software. Taking advantage of these features – all of which are available “out of the box” – can significantly increase productivity and reduce costs.
According to OFM expert Alan Brown, more recent versions of the software include tools and APIs that most users are completely unaware of. If these tools are utilised effectively, common oilfield management tasks can be completed far more efficiently than before – reducing management and administration time, and getting you to those critical business decisions more quickly and with more confidence.
Alan said “The 2014 update of OFM allows you to build interfaces with common programmes such as Excel. Whereas in the past, engineers manually copied data from OFM into Excel for analytical purposes, a simple API-based utility can do it automatically. OFM then runs your spreadsheet remotely. This frees-up time for the engineer to undertake other tasks. And these utilities can be built in minutes by the engineer himself. He no longer needs to depend on his IT department or outside vendors to build custom analyses.”
But spreadsheets are just an example. The .Net API in OFM can be used to incorporate your own custom-built in-house technologies into an application that is better suited to giving your users the kind of interactive experience they demand: one that allows them to effortlessly switch from one well to the next, to aggregate results for on-the-fly, user-defined groups of wells, and so on. While your in-house technologies may have powerful calculation engines, the all-important final user experience comes only with robust, yet flexible commercial software products like OFM.
Alan continues “The increases in workflow effectiveness can be enormous. In my experience, most oil businesses are only touching 20% of what OFM can do for them. Engineers that have fully embraced all of the features of OFM are telling me that field-wide surveillance analysis tasks that used to take them all day are now being completed in a few hours. They do this by incorporating workflows into OFM that traditionally were scattered across multiple applications, and additionally by creating calculations and visualizations specific to their own needs.
- In one case, a major user of OFM ported their corporate production allocation application into OFM. Now the customer had the best of both worlds: allocations calculated to strict company standards, run within an application that provided powerful interactive capabilities not possible with their own program.
- In another, a customer introduced an OFM plugin which provided for the use of Equations of State in determining reservoir fluid properties, crucial for understanding the performance of his waterflood.
- Finally, as an example of the incredible flexibility of the application, one operator recently used OFM to track the progress of a major forest fire, thereby giving him an up to date ability to assess the potential impact on his ongoing well workover campaign.
In Alan’s view, traditional OFM training can help, but the vast OFM repertoire cannot be covered in one course. He believes that a user-centred mentoring programme is the most effective way to deliver major efficiencies and cost savings.
“I have had meetings with engineers who have had 5 days of traditional training on OFM but still are not aware of all the features of the software. Dedicated one to one consultancy and mentoring is far more effective at identifying specific ways to become more efficient and save costs.”
OPC is delighted to be able to offer to its customers a dedicated OFM mentoring and support programme delivered by Alan Brown which can involve:
- An audit of your OFM usage and identification of inefficiencies
- Tailored mentoring and user support to help you achieve those efficiencies
- Team-based coaching, focusing on specific features that will benefit your asset
The aim of this service is to bring your users to the point at which they are capable of pushing the application to, and – as many users have done –beyond its limits.
You have invested in the application. It’s time to make it work for you.
Please contact OPC on 020 7428 1111 for more details.