Is It Time to Standardize Your Ready-to-Drill Process? 5 Reasons to Consider an Automated Workflow Solution

For most oil and gas organizations, the ready-to-drill process revolves around Monday morning meetings. The team gets together and reviews the spreadsheets that contain all the details about the drilling schedule. They figure out who needs to do what to keep things moving and walk away with their marching orders until the following week.

This is not a bad process – it’s worked for years, and keeps people on the same page. But today’s climate is unpredictable. As the price of oil goes down, companies are forced to get leaner, which often translates to being more efficient with the resources that you have. Streamlining your ready-to-drill processes is a great place to start.

The truth is that most current well delivery processes are inefficient. They’re not “official” or documented but simply the way things have always been done. Information is buried in spreadsheets and hard to find, let alone consume quickly and easily. There is often a disconnect between team members, from geologists and engineers to regulatory professionals to rig and crew schedulers, where lack of or disorganized communication slows things down. None of these snags is game-changing on its own, but when you’re drilling 100 or more wells per year, and it takes the better part of a year to prepare each of those holes, the inefficiencies add up.

SigmaFlow’s Well Delivery Solution addresses these challenges to save time, reduce costs, and make your organization run more efficiently in these lean times. SigmaFlow takes your drilling program out of Excel and into an automated workflow tool that standardizes each step of the process. It integrates the components of your pre-drilling processes with the rig schedule so everyone knows what’s happening, when, and you can always make the best use of all of your resources, from equipment to employees.

How does it work?

• The system creates standardized workflows that ensure that everyone for an asset area is following the same repeatable process, which can then be improved over time.
• Users get notified when they have work to do. The system assigns the task to the appropriate team or user, along with guidance text. Timely reminders and escalations ensure fewer tasks come in late and dependencies are always clear.
• Data is collected through workflow tasks and is instantly available for reporting and document generation, including:
  • Regulatory documents
  • Geological prognoses
  • AFEs
  • Staking requests
• The resource schedule visually shows the status of the well in the ready-to-drill process. For example, the scheduler can see which milestones have been completed and make changes accordingly, based on the current status. The regulatory professional can then see the new dates in real-time and adjust permitting approvals.
• Built-in KPIs and dashboards provide visibility into your drilling processes to identify areas where delays and re-work constantly occur. This helps you reduce cycle time and improve overall efficiency.

In short, SigmaFlow keeps track of all of the details, schedules, and interdependencies that make pre-drilling and well clearing so complex. From tracking stipulations that may prevent drilling to optimizing rig rentals to performing look-back analysis to see how to improve the process in the future, the SigmaFlow automated workflow solution takes human error out of the process so you can operate more efficiently and effectively. As a result, you save time and money – and get more of your Monday mornings back.