The Client
This global company is one of the largest providers of products and services to the upstream oil and gas industry. Its services span the scope of the well lifecycle – from locating hydrocarbons and managing geological data, to drilling and formation evaluation, well construction and completion, and optimizing production through the life of the reservoir.
The Challenge
The company required assistance in re-architecting a critical piece of an application suite used to sell and manage well-treatment projects and was used by hundreds of its customers. The suite is a mobile application and can be used when users are not on a network. This specific program was used to create and manage the schedule for hydraulic fracture treatment jobs. The company wanted to extend the life of this critical piece of the application suite and implement new enhancements by re-architecting it using the Microsoft .NET Framework.
The Solution
The company engaged Stonebridge to lead and deliver the custom development project to re-architect the software. The existing client-side architecture consisted of a number of VB6 executables that ran against a number of Access databases.
Stonebridge created a solution based on a strongly typed WinForm application written in C# utilizing ADO.NET. The solution enables the updating of jobs via a client data replication mechanism that leverages Exchange to move temporary database files between application users and via a custom data replication mechanism that file-copies data between the clients and the corporate Oracle database instance.
The custom application helped the company achieve two functional goals. First was the integration of the well treatment application suite with its proposal system. The proposal system had two main components: incorporating multiple intervals into the job and incorporating multiple flow paths into the treatment schedule. Second was to create consistency in the calculation of materials between other systems. To achieve these goals, Stonebridge consolidated material properties and formulas for all identified applications and created an administrative console in a .NET shared-component library and database. The application’s reporting engine utilized Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). These reports were written using managed code behind Word utilizing inter-op assemblies, which enabled our managed code to interact with the Word COM-based object model. Stonebridge designed Word document templates to provide dynamic content based on each treatment schedule job type.
The Benefits
- Interfaced with client’s existing customized job replication mechanism
- Enabled integration with client’s existing custom proposal system
- Improved the maintainability of the code base by migrating away from old technologies to .NET
- Consolidated complex materials calculations to provide consistency and facilitate future modifications