Technology is constantly evolving, leaving many oil and gas producers wondering when the right time is to replace the old with the new. When producers invest in new technologies for their business, they can expect more profits, more production, and more sustainability.

Deciding how to upgrade, or when you're ready to upgrade isn't always easy, but we're here to help you with the change that's involved.

Field Data Capture (FDC) is the gathering and analysis of manually entered or electronically uploaded data from field equipment. Oil and gas facilities have hundreds of metering points. Multiple departments within an organization require the data from these metering points.

Some of the field data is necessary to meet government reporting requirements. Data must be collected on time and accurately to reassure the recipients of the data’s validity.

Is your company still sending a pumper out to visually inspect every well? If so, I’m sure you’ve counted the miles and hours, not to mention the costs for fuel, tires and oil changes.

There are also safety issues involved with thousands of monthly miles driven just in case something might need attention. All of this is costing you more than you probably realize. That’s not to mention lost production from issues that occur long between trips.

Maybe you’ve thought about adding or switching to a software as a service (SaaS) platform to get alarms in place, but had heard some stories of how early alarm systems were unreliable, reacting to slight, transient spikes so often that they were soon ignored. That could lead to missing a real alarm.

The first patent for Amazon Alexa was filed in 2012. Since then, there has been an incredible growth of skills to Amazon's voice assistant, and the credit for this growth goes to machine learning. Many of these skills include asking Alexa to tell you about your schedule, to play music, or update you on the daily weather.

We've also been using machine learning (or ML as some people reference it) for years. It's been a factor in our growth to help oil and gas producers on their digital transformation journey to autonomous operations using the exact solutions that will bring them more production, profits, and sustainability.

The daunting task of keeping track of your expenses can be time-consuming and overwhelming if not managed correctly and efficiently. With the increase of mobile apps and other productivity tools, managing expenses has gotten easier.

For oil and gas, managing lease operating expenses (LOE) has gotten easier with automation and software solutions. Now, there are fewer reasons not to have the costs eat away at your companies’ ability to operate wells and keep costs within budget without having to shut-in operations.

There can be some misconceptions about how data is handled when outsourcing your Cloud Software. Given the advances in new technology and many circumstances affecting several industries, automating your operations, and outsourcing your SCADA to a cloud based platform can have many advantages. 

The key is to have the right partner so you are certain your data will be handled with care. Emerson's Zedi SaaS SCADA Solutions takes handling your data very seriously and provides advanced security for all our platform and software applications.

For any software development to be successful, it usually requires the participation of all those involved!

At Emerson Automation and Software Solutions, we help global oil and gas producers be productive, profitable, and sustainable. Thanks to technology supported by consulting and expert services, we offer complete solutions for our customers. 

We tend to lose a lot of things around the house like the TV remote, keys, or phone making us add more stress to our lives as we tend to frantically search for these lost items. Fortunately, we live in an era when automation exists, and you can get key finders to locate items. These detectors can be easily attached to things such as keys, bags, wallets, or even your pet, allowing you to quickly find your lost item, saving you time and stress from searching for them. It's as easy as clicking a button and you know where they are.

For the oil and gas industry, tracking the location of assets can also be a challenge. Using Emerson's Zedi Roughneck, a fixed asset management software solution, allows you to track equipment like compressors for example. When a compressor is not used, it is sometimes moved to be utilized at a different site. In my experience, the only person who would have known about this relocation would be the area foreman.

We’ve been innovating in the automation arena for decades. Still, recently, we realized that we had several departments working on this separately—and that we could benefit from pooling our efforts and getting an even bigger picture of the possibilities.

So, we asked ourselves this critical question “What should we be doing to innovate on a larger scale to help our oil and gas production customers become even more efficient?”

How often have you worked on a written assignment only to have an unexpected computer failure, and you lose all your information because it did not save? Once this happens, you either look for other ways to recover your work or get stuck starting from the beginning.  

When the unexpected happens, you want to pick up where you left off, especially when it comes to business operations. For this reason, it is essential to implement a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and have the appropriate technology to support services in the event of unforeseen circumstances.