Data Warehouse Architecture, PPDM Standards Enable O&G Company to Monitor Performance of Production Assets

Stonebridge's client is an independent U.S. energy company principally engaged in the acquisition, exploitation, and development of onshore oil and natural gas properties. The client’s strategy is to build shareholder value through an ongoing acquisition program focused on enhancing value through control of operations, asset development, and cost management.  

The company ’s robust acquisition strategy had created redundancy and complexity within its financial reporting function – multiple accounting departments using separate general ledgers and non-integrated accounting systems. With financial data fragmented throughout the enterprise, the company’s CAO and CFO were challenged at the monthly, quarterly, and yearly business cycle with providing a consolidated view of the performance of its 8,000 wells. Without an integrated solution for financial consolidation and reporting, the only option left to company leadership was time-consuming and error-prone: rolling up financial data manually into a spreadsheet. The prospect of new acquisitions of large groups of properties to the asset portfolio further complicated an already complex management problem.   

To address these business needs, Stonebridge developed a financial reporting solution that enables the company to monitor the performance of its production assets at the enterprise level and quickly integrate financial data of acquired properties – and do so without adding new IT staff.

At the heart of the Stonebridge solution is an intermediate data staging layer that pulls, cleanses, and standardizes data from various source systems into a data warehouse so that it can be leveraged by an enterprise reporting tool. The data warehouse is built on the IBM DB2 Universal Database Data Warehouse Enterprise Edition running on an IBM xSeries eServer. Data is first staged in a DB2 database and then standardized using the O&G industry’s Public Petroleum Data Model (PPDM) standard. Stonebridge also built a set of data tables that are compliant with the required formats for the client’s Cognos-based financial reporting and enterprise planning software tools. Data files leveraged by the data warehouse are stored in an IBM AS/400 midrange server. Additionally, Stonebridge provides the client with on-demand reporting support and data warehouse maintenance via a fixed-cost managed services arrangement.          

The benefits to the client include:

• Immediate and positive impact on financial reporting, planning, budgeting, and intra-month operational reporting
• Acquired properties’ financial data integrated in less than a week
• Finance team owns the reporting environment
• Flexible means to add and remove data sources
• Better quality input data and faster report delivery via a unified database layer
• Cancellation of expensive migration efforts to collapse multiple general ledgers
• No requirement for additional IT staff to support the data warehouse/reporting environment