After many years of organic growth, and a series of acquisitions, a leading U.S. E&P company was confronted with the harsh reality that their efficiency and revenues were being negatively impacted, because as they had grown so did their number of well delivery scheduling methods. With every new acquisition having its own way of scheduling, the company had no single, uniform way to schedule their operations across drilling, completions, and facilities disciplines. At the same time, big data was coming to the forefront in the industry, which reinforced the need for a central scheduling platform.

Faced with this challenge, the company explored 5 different scheduling software solutions, including a custom-built in-house application. Based on its data model, visualization capabilities, ease of integration, ability to run multiple scenarios and compare analytics plus more, the Company selected Actenum’s scheduling software, Actenum DSO/Upstream.

Rapid Implementation

The company’s initial goal was to schedule only drilling and completions using the Actenum solution. However, after starting a pilot program with one business unit, three months later all business units within the company were using the Actenum software. In record time, the company went from having disparate schedules to one version of the truth. It was the fastest discovery-to-implementation process the company had ever experienced. Additionally, for the first time, the company had an enterprise-wide scheduling solution that provided management insight into all the activities going on across all business units.

One Platform for All Disciplines

As a result of implementing Actenum scheduling software, the company benefited from having drilling, completions, facility, and pipeline scheduling that was more accurate and took fewer people to manage. The Actenum solution allowed everyone in the organization to access a complete, single-source view of operations. Furthermore, the solution easily integrated into the company’s existing upstream applications.

Actenum
Pictured above is the Lifecycle Visualization and Integrated Schedule. This shows us the lifecycle view for a set of wells. We have batched operations across all activity types, meaning all activities have multiple wells associated with them. We then are displaying multiple milestones on the activity boxes for different activity classes and their color coding indicates the health of the activities. This allows us to make sure our precedences are being honored, our key milestones are on track for various activities and ultimately ensure that our schedule is healthy and executable.
Making Informed Decisions Faster

The company has found that one of the key benefits of Actenum’s software is a reduction in the time it takes to make informed decisions. Before Actenum, it took 8 engineers 2 weeks to create and evaluate scenarios that would enable them to lock in their quarterly budget. With Actenum, it took only 1 planning analyst and 2 engineers 2 days to complete this exercise.

Actenum
Pictured above is Scenario Comparisons for Schedule Health and KPI Analysis. This view is showing us the ability to compare scenarios and see both visual and key metric comparisons across the two scenarios. The color coding of milestones (IDL, SP, FP, etc.) in the Activity boxes also helps us decide whether we have moved activities too close to today, making our plan riskier. While the color coding tells us how likely we are to be successful in our plan, the metrics along the bottom ultimately tell us whether we will have a better high-level cash flow answer for the given pricing assumptions. The combination of the two attributes help us decide between various operational scenarios very quickly.

As well, prior to implementing Actenum, the disciplines of drilling, completions, and facilities worked in silos at the company. Each would make changes to their specific schedules without the other knowing. As a result, each discipline would have to laboriously check with the others to determine the impact of the changes, and even then, operations sometimes became unsynchronized. Using Actenum, as the schedule changes, there is no need for these manual checks: everybody sees the composite schedule in real time, the impact of any change is reflected throughout all disciplines, and there is no more wasted time checking changes manually.

Fundamentally Changing the Way They Worked

After only 3 months, Actenum scheduling software fundamentally changed the way the company worked. With the software, the company was able to create a comprehensive schedule that laid out well delivery tasks and resources so that everything was in one place and synchronized. Planning is now completed faster and more accurately, and the company gains immediate insights into how changes to the schedule impact costs and other business goals. As a result, implementing Actenum was a game-changer that will pay back in efficiency and productivity for years to come.

If you’d like to see how Actenum can help increase your operational efficiency, contact us at info@actenum.com or watch this 2 min overview.