Petris Mines Critical Data With WebFOCUS

Oil and Gas Industry Unearths the Power of Embedded BI

Petris Technology, Inc. is a leading supplier of enterprise information management, data management, and geoscience applications for the global oil and gas industry, with more than 500 clients worldwide. The company’s specialty is data management, including data quality, data integration, and business intelligence (BI). Petris leverages its technology to integrate information from many different enterprise applications, synthesizing information from financial, seismic, borehole, production, drilling, and pipeline data sources to help managers make better decisions.

The oil and gas companies that Petris serves typically rely on numerous and diverse information systems to support their complex operations. It is an ongoing challenge to integrate information from these disparate systems to deliver context-relevant insight to the right person at the right time. A wide variety of personnel must be able to easily collaborate and share information, including engineers, geologists, physicists, production operators, supervisors, planners, asset managers, facility managers, and third-party providers.

To complicate matters further, their most expensive assets are invisible.“The oil and gas industry is unique in that you can’t see your biggest assets, as they are underground,” says Jim Pritchett, chief executive officer at Petris. “You rely on your information systems to tell you what’s down there. You can’t go to a warehouse and physically count your inventory. You have to rely on your data to keep you informed.”

As an Information Builders value-added reseller, Petris uses WebFOCUS to transform all of this data into meaningful reports, which help to pinpoint trends and patterns. Most recently, the software provider bundled WebFOCUS with its flagship PetrisWINDS Enterprise environment to create PetrisWINDS Analytics, a unique BI tool that allows energy companies to manage and measure performance in a highly integrated, visual way.

“WebFOCUS shortens the cycle time for gathering and federating data, so exploration and production (E&P) companies can collaborate better and make informed decisions quickly, based on reliable information,” Pritchett notes.

Exploring the BI Landscape

Developed specifically for the needs of exploration personnel, production departments, and oil and gas executives, PetrisWINDS Analytics takes advantage of the unique data-integration capabilities of PetrisWINDS Enterprise to enable real-time access to technical and financial data, including well log, seismic, and production data.

“We already had the data, but we needed to be able to present it easily to middle managers and executives,” Pritchett explains. “We also wanted more flexible adapters and connectors to SAP and other financial systems. Information Builders offered both types of technology.”

Information Builders provided an integrated BI environment with configurable dashboards, a parameterized reporting environment with drop-down menus, and guided ad hoc reporting templates to help clients get off to a fast start with a new analytic environment.

“WebFOCUS was the logical choice because of its ease of use and flexibility,” says René Calderon, a technical support manager for Petris, who creates prototypes for customers and prospects. “We especially like its charting capabilities, which are perfect for the oil and gas industry since they offer a quick look at production, expenses, budgeting and anything else that can be measured from a financial and production standpoint.”

Pritchett favored WebFOCUS because it enables Petris to build customer prototypes very quickly using its own data. Additionally, through its iWay Software division, Information Builders can help Petris extend the PetrisWINDS Enterprise environment to incorporate other applications and data sources in the future.

“We did a lot of research and it became clear that WebFOCUS is the broadest and easiest system of its kind to use,” says John Wearing, vice president of product management at Petris. “We also liked that Information Builders creates BI products that are independent of any ERP platform. That’s different from SAP, IBM, and Microsoft, which develop BI products, first and foremost, for their own applications.”

Digging Into WebFOCUS

Petris began working with WebFOCUS a month prior to an important oil and gas industry trade show. By the time of the event, they had developed a working prototype of the PetrisWINDS Analytics environment. Today, Petris is actively selling the software.

“We configure the BI tools to each client’s needs,” says Calderon. “WebFOCUS enables rapid prototyping, which is essential to closing complex sales. Our clients love the performance – they are seeing very quick response times, even with huge volumes of data. They also like having the flexibility to visualize their technical and financial data in so many ways, including dashboards, tabs, maps, bar graphs, a menu tree, or whatever hierarchy or view makes sense. With WebFOCUS you aren’t locked into only one look and feel.”

WebFOCUS lets clients update these complex displays simultaneously from many different data sources. A single dashboard might include a pie chart from production, a digital map from exploration, and a graph from the general ledger. Synthesizing this information through one common display frees the client to make associations and inferences that they might not otherwise be able to make.

Breaking Through to New Layers of Insight

PetrisWINDS Enterprise integrates with a number of third-party oil and gas applications to create a common data model. Pritchett describes the software platform as a middleware environment, a search engine, and an extract, transform, and load (ETL) transformation engine all in one.

“On the front end, it’s like Google for the oil and gas industry,” he explains. “On the back end, it crawls through various information systems and builds a catalog of metadata, then lets you conduct sophisticated searches on a vast quantity of data very quickly.”

All of the information in the metadata catalog is now accessible to PetrisWINDS Analytics, along with all the raw data in the source systems. Authorized users can view the information at the well level, well group level, or any other level of asset hierarchy using graphical views, such as pie charts, trend graphs, and bubble graphs.

For example, executives might be interested in tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) about their assets, such as forecasted versus actual production statistics on a year-to-date basis. Middle managers could study these same KPIs as they relate to specific geographic regions, drilling down to uncover trends and develop forecasts. Data stewards can use the software to monitor daily changes as information arrives from the various wells, pipelines, and other equipment assets, broken down regionally or organizationally over time.

Previously, this information wasn’t available in a consolidated fashion, and it couldn’t be combined on the fly into a cohesive view, so it would often take weeks to put custom reports together – a job that could be performed only by highly skilled people. By the time they gathered the information and put it in a presentable form, it was often outdated. If they discovered an anomaly, they would have to make changes in all the various systems one by one – exploration, drilling, production, finance, and so forth.

Now the information is automatically published and the source systems are automatically updated whenever someone makes a change in any of them.

“We are enabling customers to access and manipulate a very complex set of information systems without special skills in a much more expedient way,” explains Wearing. “Thanks to the user-friendly analytical and reporting interface we’ve constructed with WebFOCUS, we can push this capability to managers and business people on a need to know basis. This makes the entire enterprise more efficient.” 

Pritchett looks forward to exploiting the potential of WebFOCUS Active Technologies to extend this powerful analytic environment to production personnel and operators in the field.

“Web-based BI systems are great, but you can’t always get to the web, especially from some of these remote field locations,” he points out. “WebFOCUS Active Technologies is a great feature that allows us to deliver analytics to hand-held devices and mobile personnel.”

Refined Reporting for Industry Regulators

PetrisWINDS Analytics is useful not only for managing financial and technical operations, but also for responding to industry regulators as well. In the wake of the Gulf oil spill, there is more environmental scrutiny into every facet of the oil and gas industry, with particular attention to exploration, drilling, and production companies. For example, many states now require natural gas companies that extract gas from shale plate formations to maintain detailed records of their activities to minimize potential groundwater contamination during drilling and hydraulic fracturing. “The need for comprehensive reporting continues to grow, onshore and off,” sums up Pritchett.

As experienced oil and gas professionals retire, companies must train new recruits and help them to get up to speed in this complex industry. Preserving information and making it easily accessible to a new generation of workers is a fundamental requirement.

All of these industry and enterprise trends point to a need for greater reporting, analysis, and data-visualization tools. Petris is leading the way.

“PetrisWINDS Analytics is an important step in the right direction, since it lets operators extract data from legacy oil and gas applications and present it in a modern, highly interactive way,” Pritchett concludes. “Our software helps them to preserve their intellectual capital and carry it forward to a new generation of workers.”