Integration and Assurance of Well Documents and Data – Essential Preparation for Tomorrow

Abstract

During the last four years over 330,000 electronic drilling, completions and interventions documents have been consolidated in a new document management system, improving both their accessibility and future worth to the expanding user base. The system’s document structure builds on earlier, engineer-led experience and has contributed to the new company-wide standard for managing these documents. At the same time, the document management project has eliminated over 180,000 duplicate or obsolete documents. As part of the migration from the old system to the new one, common well names have been adopted to support integration activities both within the Wells function and also with the Subsurface and Operations communities. Directional surveys are key links between these communities and over the same period, an in-depth, field by field review of the company’s UK directional survey data has been conducted. This activity is now approximately 67% complete. Together, these activities are seen as essential preparations for the future and they have already helped streamline some activities in both asset acquisitions and disposals. These tasks have taken time, but measured preparation plus a degree of pragmatism have ensured they remain manageable. Care has been taken to maintain the document folder structure so it remains familiar to users, whilst taking advantage of the superior capabilities, such as search and assurance available in the new system. The paper contains an outline of the structure, metadata and a description of the project’s goals and history, including some of the challenges commonly encountered in preparing, processing and exporting and importing data. Details of the directional survey data verification process is also provided. This subject is of interest to many companies because of the scale of the exercise and the growing recognition in the industry of its technical and commercial importance.

Exploratory information searching in the enterprise: A study of user satisfaction and task performance

“…When searching for documents in oil and gas organizations, staff are often reliant on a small amount of textual metadata. This is because metadata are used to influence ranking of search results, may be the only way to locate and request some published digital information (as the contents may be confidential by default), or the item is physical in nature (Liddell, Ternyik, & Modi, ; Sawaryn et al., ). Many project deliverables and supporting information are often stored in several places, poorly tagged, and rarely cite lists of references (Andersen, ; Garbarini, Catron, & Pugh, ; Quaadgras & Beath, ).…”