Maybe you’ve declared your intention to digitally transform your production. That’s great. It’s a growing trend and it will really boost efficiency. But the jury is still out on whether to do it in-house or to let us do it for you.

I have a question that may clarify that decision for you:

What are you good at?

You’re good at evaluating leases, considering how to economically produce a field and to get that oil and gas to market. If you were to jump into the field of developing a cloud based platform, what would that look like in terms of hiring, training and implementing?

“Zedi is light years ahead of the competition!” This statement has become a common theme at our client meetings. Producers urgently require the deployment of a proven digital strategy; however, implementation has historically lagged for weeks, months or even years when working with other vendors.

These producers typically receive conflicting information on exactly what is involved in the deployment, what is needed from them, the timing of it all, and what their technology partner is truly capable of bringing to the table to help with it all.

We set out to change that.

Albert Einstein, as you may recall, was pretty good at understanding complex stuff like, say, the makeup of the universe, quantum physics and the like. It’s interesting that he’s the one who said that if you didn’t understand something well enough to explain it to your grandmother, you didn’t really understand it.

Well, I like to think of myself as something of an oilfield technology expert—I‘m even able to successfully explain it all to my Grandma, who totally ‘gets it’ now. So I hope I can explain its benefits to you in three basic steps. 

What if we could help you know about production issues instantly—anywhere in the world? 
What if all relevant personnel got that information in an easy-to-read dashboard at the same time? 
What if that same information system helped valves and pumps self-monitor so they required less oversight?

There has been much discussion through the years in many sectors of the economy around what the “Internet of Things” (IoT) can do to transform the way we work and live.  In brief, the IoT is about networking “things” like devices and even life-forms so that information may be collected from these things over time and form the basis for analysis and decisions.

IoT inevitably involves sensors, wireless technology of some description, a cloud to aggregate data, and analytics to create insights from this data.  Many people have encountered this business paradigm in their personal lives, whether it is through wearable fitness trackers (maybe you are counting steps, and then uploading that information to an App on your smart-phone or into the cloud), your internet-connected Emerson thermostat, household security system, or your smart TV.  These are consumer examples of the IoT phenomenon, and collectively are described as the wearables or Smart Home sub-segments.

SCADA and other remote monitoring systems introduced a step change to the industry in the area of operational efficiency by providing a positive impact on run-time, production and reduced operating costs. However, with low commodity prices and lower producing wells, there is still a challenge for business cases to justify putting monitoring on all assets.

This blog post has been updated as of May 4th, 2021

Several years ago I was at a customer site and there were two executives who were struggling to figure out if a field they recently purchased was producing as much as they were expecting.

They had over fifty reports in their system, but they didn't know where to look. It didn't help that they had multiple systems and each one had slightly different numbers. Everything this company did was electronic-based and they collected so much data that obviously they had this information somewhere. The big question, though, was where do you look?