What Is Operational Excellence?
Operational excellence, specifically in oil and gas companies, means running the assets safely, reliably, sustainably, and cost effectively. Bain & Company outlines six constituting areas for operational excellence in oil and gas companies:
- Health, safety, and environmental performance
- Best-in-class return on capital across all assets
- Best-in-class standards and systems
- High-performance (continuous improvement) culture
- Distinctive core capabilities
- Efficient operations and sustainable business practices
Focusing on these six areas is key to driving operational excellence as it allows oil and gas firms to cope with continuously changing macro conditions, such as fluctuating oil prices and product demand, as well as addressing operational risks.
Using Visual Analytics for Operational Excellence
The concept of operational excellence has been well understood for decades, both in the field, as well as the corporate level in oil and gas companies. In the field, the operators, engineers, and supervisors use sensor data, operations data, geologic data, and well data to meet specific goals aligned with the business objectives from the six constituting areas comprising operational excellence as described above.
It is important for business managers to accurately track and predict the performance of the business units based on this data. For routine reporting purposes, even when business units have a good handle on the data and understanding of the information conveyed by the data, managers prefer a visual representation of information (metrics, KPIs etc.), as opposed to tables. This is due to the advantage that graphs and charts have over tables in translating immense amount of information that is buried in data quickly, when presented in the right way. TIBCO Spotfire stands out as a tool that is used in many oil and gas majors for delivering an interactive visual analytics experience and driving data-driven decision-making, fast.
For data discovery use cases in oil and gas, where the cause and effect relationships need to be discovered from data, TIBCO Spotfire is the tool of choice for visual analysis and data exploration. When the data volume becomes large and/or becomes a combination of batch and real-time data, and/or structured and unstructured data, the hypothesis becomes complex and non-intuitive. Oil and gas companies look towards expert analysts and data scientists to discover trends and insights from this data. The data experts take advantage of the TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R embedded in the TIBCO Spotfire platform to perform complex analysis and generate deeper insights.
At the sold-out Energy Forum (#TIBCOEF15) organized by TIBCO in Houston on September 1-2, 2015, nearly 500 customers exchanged their best practices and success stories on how TIBCO Spotfire drives data analytics-based decision-making in their organizations, which has become increasingly important, especially in the current business environment.
In the coming few weeks, we will take you through real-world TIBCO Spotfire use cases presented at the Energy Forum by R Lacy, Ruths.ai, and more.
Stay tuned!
Register for the “Energy Forum Recap Webinar” to see what was presented.
