The daunting task of keeping track of your expenses can be time-consuming and overwhelming if not managed correctly and efficiently. With the right software and automation in place along with 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.

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.

Way, way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had a very annoying flip phone that was really only able to make and receive calls and (upon the rare occasion) get and send a few random text messages from other techie types. The main reason I found this phone so annoying is I wanted it to be able to do so much more; and it seemed like it shouldn't be all that difficult to make it happen.

But, that's all there was on the market at the time.

I continuously wondered why on earth someone didn't make them to fetch my email, or have a decent camera in them. Then it finally became a reality and just like that we all became more mobile than we had ever dreamed of being! It was AWESOME being set free from waiting for an email, and unchained from my desk where I would often be found waiting for information to be sent.

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.

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.

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?

It’s surprising how many operators are still using one software system or company to monitor tanks, another to automate pumps and yet another for back-office reporting software. There was a time in history when this was necessary since there was a lot of narrow specialization, but so much has changed (for the better) with SaaS and systems that streamlining today just makes more sense.

When you receive your gas compositions and fluid analysis reports from a lab, what do you do with it? You upload it into the meter, enter it into your field data capture or production accounting system and file it away. Do you know how this new analysis compares to the previous ones? Can you see the meter’s historical analyses all at once? You can now with DeltaV SaaS SCADA Composition Management.

HMI (Human Machine Interface) – is really just the software application that presents information to an operator, or a user about the state of a process, then accepts and implements the operators’ control instructions.

This is usually displayed in a graphic format. But, it's that graphic format, and how well (or poorly) it's designed that can make all the difference. We, the humans as the users are generally visual learners. Which is just one of the reasons why our users love our HMI so much; hi-res, crystal clear graphics right in front of them that are easy to understand and give users the ability to make better business decisions.

Awhile back a friend decided to replace a leaky faucet himself and save some money. He thought the faucet was screwed on, so he grabbed a wrench and started twisting away.