The Client
SM Energy Company, based in Denver, is focused on the exploration, exploitation, development, acquisition and production of natural gas and crude oil in the United States. In addition to headquarters, the company operates in a number of core areas that are managed by five regional offices. Each office is staffed with an experienced team of geologists, geophysicists, engineers and landmen with extensive experience in the area they work. While corporate provided operational support, the regions were highly autonomous in terms of reporting and analysis.
The Challenge
The company’s regional and corporate leaders faced a common management problem: the need for a consistent, data-driven view of organizational performance at a given point in time. The core business systems (Excalibur, Aries, and several others) and corporate reporting did not provide the information regional offices needed to manage performance. As a result, local expert(s) in each region managed shadow reporting systems in Access or Excel, manipulating information from multiple business systems to meet local needs. The end result was a complex environment delivering inconsistent reporting across the regions.
The Solution
SM Energy engaged Stonebridge to identify high-level information needs and challenges in the organization and to create an overall architecture for delivering data to executives, analysts, and workers. To create the solution, Stonebridge interviewed a variety of users at the corporate office and at each regional office to gain an understanding of the current environment and identify gaps in reporting and analysis capabilities. These interviews drove toward common subject areas identified as needed across roles and core business activities such as well master maintenance, lease operations, capital expenditures, drilling, production, and reserves.
The solution architecture, utilizing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2, was then created to manage information flows from the existing operational systems into an environment expressly designed for reporting and analysis. The architecture also contained a well master integration hub used to support analytics and simplify well master data integration across systems. Finally, a well information portal component was devised to enable search and delivery of important well-related content. Through this extensible solution design, the power of data visualization through the P2 Analytics platform allows self-service navigation through multidimensional views of asset data to unlock insights previously unavailable to the business.
Stonebridge and SM Energy worked as an integrated team to construct the solution incrementally in a series of projects that established the technical foundation, well master data management solution, and information delivery capabilities to support both corporate and regional users.
The Benefits
- Corporate and regional users share a consistent set of performance metrics
- Reduction in manual data assembly processes at the region and corporate level
- Improved productivity through the use of search and a common well information portal
- Integrated set of well master information from multiple systems provides a “single version of the truth”
- Higher assurance of well data quality through validation and reporting built into extract, transform and load processing
- Reduction of “point to point” interfaces to share well information across operational systems
- Long-term vision and roadmap established for the addition of new analysis and reporting capabilities through a common well information portal