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Supermajor Relies on Stonebridge’s Enterprise Volumetrics Expertise to Provide Path to the Cloud for Hydrocarbon Accounting

Home  »  2022  »  Supermajor Relies on Stonebridge’s Enterprise Volumetrics Expertise to Provide Path to the Cloud for Hydrocarbon Accounting

Like many large energy enterprises with global operations and ongoing M&A activity, a US-based supermajor relies on a mix of commercial hydrocarbon accounting products across its vast operational footprint. The supermajor developed proprietary data management tools to manage the flow of field operations data, volumes, and other well data into its myriad hydrocarbon accounting systems. However, substantial risk was identified with the long term supportability of multiple on-premise commercial solutions, proprietary digital infrastructure, and internally developed data management solutions given that system knowledge was limited to a select group of users nearing retirement and that sustaining new users is historically challenging.

Seeking to bring consistency and provide a path to journey to the cloud, the supermajor identified Energy Components as a strategic system for production accounting and regulatory compliance that advances its digital transformation goals.

Opportunity

To mitigate the risks associated with its current state hydrocarbon accounting systems and set the organization up to meet its growth objectives, the supermajor identified the following business and technology drivers.

  • Modern architecture for on-premise implementations that can be eventually migrated to leverage the cloud’s economy of scale and elasticity to improve performance, extend capability, drive data consumption, and reduce total cost of ownership.
  • Decision-ready data at every moment – continuously cleanse and ensure hydrocarbon accounting data quality for real time decisions and optimization initiatives with one stop data access for all business unit data needs.
  • Future proofed hydrocarbon accounting technology – adoption of commercially developed cloud-based production accounting and data management solutions ensures the company is always running on the latest technologies that benefit from continuous investment and improvement.
  • Return on tech investment – set clear expectations and timelines for technology investments to partially begin paying back within a conservative 4-year period.
  • Seamless, nondisruptive for existing reporting – leverages existing ecosystem of data tools and streamlines reporting process in Tableau, Power BI, and Excel.

Even with the resources of one of the top 10 largest integrated oil & gas companies in the world, the supermajor would need extensive expertise for executing its digital transformation strategy, including planning and proof of concept, enterprise scale software implementation, systems integration, and change management.

Solution

Stonebridge Consulting was selected to provide a two prong solution for modernizing the supermajor’s hydrocarbon accounting technology stack, including on-premise implementation of Quorum Software’s Energy Components and EnerHub, Stonebridge’s energy-specific data management platform. The solution would build on a proof of concept/pilot project at one of the supermajor’s business units and extensive upfront planning to create a migration blueprint for the entire organization.

The future state of its hydrocarbon accounting digital infrastructure was designed to span the production accounting data lifecycle, from ingestion and staging through exception flagging and interfacing with other business systems, including enterprise data warehouses. EnerHub serves as the conduit of quality controlled data between Energy Component’s Oracle staging environment and production database. Streamlining deployment is EnerLink, EnerHub’s integration layer that provides oil & gas teams with dozens of connectors to commercial data sources and a robust API.

EnerCore provides the supermajor with a library of pre-built business rules to rapidly implement data quality checks as well as flexible rule editing to customize QC to the company’s unique business requirements at the asset, field, business unit, and enterprise level. Exceptions are automatically routed to data stewards at the supermajor for clean-up and tracking using pre-built and customizable dashboards. EnerHub’s automated interfaces ensure data integrity and load field operations and well data directly into Energy Components, including well tests, daily allocated volumes, temperatures, samples, gas analysis, and 45 different report types.

Similarly sized and scoped software implementation projects typically take 12 to 18 months to complete. However, leveraging Stonebridge’s deep oil & gas industry subject matter expertise, project accelerators, and intimate knowledge of production accounting and systems integration, the project timeline was optimized for delivery within 9 to 10 months.

Approach

Critical to success for a project of this scale is testing of strategies, identifying unforeseen challenges, and solving problems prior to a full migration commitment. To this end, Stonebridge assisted the supermajor in de-risking the technical migration workflows and verifying system function and compatibility before dedicating the necessary resources for actual migration.

Stonebridge’s implementation team of Energy Components experts, systems integrators, and data managers deployed the proposed hydrocarbon accounting system first at one of the supermajor’s international business units The success of this pilot project clearly aligned stakeholders and trained the product  champions as they worked through the system  change. Developed in tight collaboration with stakeholders at the supermajor, Stonebridge’s solution roadmap informed and considered all areas of the migration, including Energy Components configuration, data connections, future state architecture, historic data strategy, and rationalization of reports.

Stonebridge also implemented EnerHub at the international business unit and configured custom data quality rules to validate and cleanse data before loading into the production Energy Components database. Scripts were developed to correct data based on business feedback supported by curated views in the Oracle staging environment to create and load templates for current period and historical reporting.

By pre-investing in a small scale proof of concept of the envisioned hydrocarbon accounting solution, the supermajor reduced risk and streamlined enterprise level deployment by developing a repeatable migration blueprint. The oil & gas producer is currently implementing its new hydrocarbon accounting and data quality solutions globally. User acceptance testing and training is included in the full migration along with ongoing stakeholder engagement to ensure continuous alignment on project delivery and any adjustments to the migration blueprint.

Accelerated by Stonebridge’s unique skillsets in Energy Components, oil & gas data management, and reusable project IP, the supermajor is shrinking cycle times and estimates a savings between $550,000 to $1.65M on its proof of concept implementation. This success has set the producer up to meet its digital transformation goals, a journey to the cloud that the multinational producer is embarking on in 2023 with Stonebridge.