During the current economic conditions and market volatility, the oil and gas industry is no exception to business leaders experiencing the overwhelming need for digital transformation. As energy companies have been faced with lower oil prices, cost reductions, and diversification of renewable energy resources; the lack of visibility to assets and complex operational processes has forced organizations to quickly shift to a digital-first strategy. There are considerable benefits for oil and gas companies that successfully integrate agile techniques into the current project-focused and safety-conscious environments.
However, the industry’s structure and culture brings great challenges to such change. Continual mergers and acquisitions between operators, diverse legacy systems, and interdependencies across the supply chain are only a few of the common hurdles that have created concerns with digital transformations and solutions. Compacting these concerns is the well-known gap between IT and the business. Effective cooperation between these key teams will result in significant business impact and data that can be leveraged as VALUE.
Utilizing proper integrations, automation, data management, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and predictive analytics helps companies produce real-time data to all departments of an organization. Proper use of data and analytics can increase profitability, maximize operations and asset performance, optimize current investments, and reduce risk making the urgency to adopt advanced technologies and solutions necessary. The ability to make more informed decisions faster and enable improvements across the end-to-end process—from drilling and production to finance and human resources has enhanced the entire value chain.
The Oil and Gas industry has many bespoke technologies built over several decades for specific custom capabilities. Many of these products will or have become anchors on the organization as companies seek expansion into new opportunities. In order to maximize utilization of these legacy technologies without the need to fully replace them, analytics platforms and data lakes will become essential.
Aptimized has been implementing agile methodologies for analytical system deployment in the Oil and Gas Sector. The agile approach helps grow collaboration between the business operations teams and technology professionals, while also helping to rapidly bring new capabilities into high cost or high-risk areas of the business. Data analytics are now being used to manage everything from well production, predictive financial modeling based on economic change, as well as operational monitoring for key maintenance activity. Companies that begin this digital journey now will be better suited for survival and success in the new world energy markets.