Some of us (myself included) tend to lose random things around the house like the TV remote, keys, or phone that stress us out 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, click a button to make your TV remote make a sound, or set other devices to find missing items saving us time and stress from searching for them.

For the remotely located production sites, tracking the location of assets can also be a challenge. Using Emerson's DeltaV™ SaaS SCADA Asset Protect, a fixed asset management software you are able to track all kinds of equipment. For an example, when a compressor isn't being used, sometimes it gets 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.

Keeping your oil and gas production automation systems current is a delicate balance. You have to keep up with ever-changing hardware, interfaces with other software and with improvements on the one hand. On the other hand, you don’t want to spend hours with updates that save up all the changes for one giant yearly revision—that may come with unintended and untested crashes.

That’s the benefit of evergreen cloud software like Emerson's DeltaV SaaS SCADA. It grows in tiny increments just like an evergreen plant. From one day or month to the next, you don’t notice its growth—a new leaf here, a bit thicker trunk there—but it keeps growing and adapting to changes in seasons without skipping a beat.

In 2011, IBM’s Watson took on two of Jeopardy’s top winners in a contest of knowledge and speed. After three exciting days, Watson had more than tripled the winnings of either human. Let's apply that to oil and gas production data insights enabling you to triple your 'winnings' - by gaining more production, more profits and more sustainability.

In the digital oilfield that lives on data and is powered by computers light years past Watson, end users are starting to get answers to questions they never dreamed of asking before.

Instead of competing with computers, many oil and gas producers are teaming with AI (artificial intelligence) so that everyone wins. And keeps winning.