5 Ways to Unleash Land Productivity

Part 5 – Solving the Acquisition Data Onboarding Problem

The legacy land management software solutions on the market today fail to meet the modern needs of the land department because they stopped innovating years ago. They’ve become stagnant and by neglecting to continuously improve they’ve neglected their users. Harsh words, but when the success of an oil & gas business hinges on its choice of software, a bright light needs to be shined on the problems that can hold it back, create risk, and hit the bottom line.

We’ve done a lot of shining in this series on the perils of legacy land software, but it wouldn’t be fair to say that W Energy Software is perfect – nothing is in the world of software. What we can say is that our land management software provides superior functionality across every land workflow. Why? We’re the only oil & gas software developer with a product roadmap and a passion to keep innovating. If there is a gap in what our software can do, rest assured that we have a plan to fill it. The result is a continuously improving and fully unified upstream ERP solution built on the cloud that seamlessly integrates land, division order, accounting, and revenue distribution workflows.

So far, the 5 Ways to Unleash Land Productivity blog series has covered overcoming inaccurate acreage reporting, ensuring land data integrity, automating the payment approval process, and streamlining ownership data management. The series concludes by delving into the all too familiar problem facing land teams following the acquisition of oil & gas properties. If you haven’t noticed yet, our solutions have a recurring theme: The W Energy Software solution is pragmatic, modern, and enables land professionals to work smarter, not harder.

The Post-Acquisition Data Onboarding Dilemma

So, your team just acquired acreage in the SCOOP/STACK, now what? You need to get up and running with your new leases fast in order to understand the provisions and payment obligations you just inherited. But there’s a problem and it looks like this:

• The seller bulk exported a large volume of data from their legacy land software, now it’s your job to decipher the chaotic mix of spreadsheets and data fields.
• Your legacy land system has limited methods to import data, forcing you to add records one at a time or load it directly into the database, which poses multiple risks in itself.
• Your legacy land system has no way to validate data before it is loaded, forcing you to write scripts to verify the data then manually fix what is inaccurate or missing.
• Managing data onboarding is too big for your team, you’ll need to hire a contractor or two to prep, load, and QC acquisition land data.

What’s worse than dealing with one legacy land solution’s limitations? Dealing with two, the seller’s and yours. The overarching problem is that legacy land solutions are bad at exporting and importing data.

The Cure to the Data Onboarding Headache

W Energy Software makes the process of adding acquisition data to our land management solution about as painless as it can get. For starters, your land team can do it in-house, no need to pay for expensive third-party consultants. That’s because we’ve simplified everything and built a complete workflow around getting acquisition (and other large datasets) into our cloud-based platform.

First, our import templates provide a one-to-one relationship with land business objects within the software’s user interface. Current, up to date templates are downloaded directly from the application, using a separate spreadsheet for Agreements, Tracts and Sub-Tracts. Furthermore, tabs exist within each spreadsheet template that will map the data from the tab of the spreadsheet directly to its matching tab within the Agreement, Tract or Subtract.

The big upshot is that it’s an “all or nothing” import process. If your data doesn’t pass our robust validation logic, it won’t load. If the load triggers a validation error, the error log will direct you (in plain English) to the tab of your spreadsheet, row within that tab, and value that is causing the error. This iterative process ensures acquisition data is correct and complete before being loaded, enabling you to fill in gaps in chain of title and cross-validate effective dates.

Kelsi Flores spent over 11 years in Land Administration with XTO Energy, a subsidiary of EXXON Mobil before she joined W Energy Software. She is a Certified Division Order Analyst and past president of her local chapter. Over the last year and a half, she has worked tirelessly with land departments at E&P companies to create a best-in-class land solution for the industry. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, reading, and spending time with her husband and 2 daughters, ages 2 and 6.