Measurement Milestones Part 3 – A Perfect Data Management Storm

Throughout my two decades of experience in the energy sector, I’ve witnessed the evolution of measurement data management.  The needs of measurement professionals have constantly evolved as the industry’s needs have shifted and technology has come and gone.   It has been a journey with milestones that are shaping the future of measurement data management.

In my first post about measurement milestones, I presented our endgame for W Energy Software’s measurement product, WE Measure, by defining the core values the software should embody for the measurement community.  And in my last post, I made the case for change and why measurement data management technology must keep pace with the needs of users.  In the next milestone in this series, I’d like to underscore why now is the right time to accelerate that change.

It has been a perfect storm for the oil & gas business.  We have aging assets and infrastructure.  There’s vintage measurement technology out in the field and legacy measurement solutions back in the office.  The digital oilfield has created torrents of data, a flood that the industry was struggling with before the impact of 2020’s pandemic.  The industry must accelerate toward modern measurement data management in order to achieve more with a leaner team.

Market turmoil has piled on an unprecedented imperative to accurately account for every drop of oil and MCF of gas to uplift margins as much as possible.  This ‘perfect storm’ underscores the vital importance of measurement even more, where upstream and midstream need more than ever to aggregate a vast array of measurement sources, validate that data, and get it into the hands of the professionals who need it, from accounting and field staff to management and boards of directors.

Our industry is full of exceptional talent and the brightest minds have done wonders when it comes to finding hydrocarbons, optimizing production, creating efficient transportation, and maximizing the recovery and use of each molecule.  Unfortunately, this is some of the same talent and experience our industry loses during this ‘perfect storm’.   By leveraging current technology to develop modern measurement data software WE Measure can do wonders to drive costs out of our organizations, optimize data management, and bring new innovation to analytics.

WE Measure will deliver much-needed cost efficiencies by tapping into the economy of scale offered by the cloud and W Energy Software’s application architecture.  There are enormous savings just in terms of eliminating the total cost of ownership associated with in-house data infrastructure and servers as well as the associated G&A that comes with on-prem services.  There’s also enormous value in having a client’s measurement data integrated into the same platform as their business software, which eliminates manual data wrangling, accelerates cycle time, and improves business performance.  It all adds up to tangible cost reduction while also enhancing data integrity and accuracy, which translates to more accurate volume reporting.  These system-gained efficiencies drop more revenue to the bottom line.

There’s a trailblazing opportunity to invest in the industry I love and bring powerful new measurement data management capabilities and business efficiencies to the companies who produce, transport, and account for hydrocarbons.

In my next post, I’ll share W Energy Software’s strategies for building the next generation of measurement data management and accelerating the change the industry needs now more than ever.  And stay tuned for the last topic in this series, which will discuss the benefits for energy companies who join the Measurement Product Consortium and the vital role they will play in building the future of measurement.