There and Back Again: Embedded Data Analytics

Silhouette of oil pump is pumping crude oil on the oil field in the night under sky with stars and Milky Way. Oil industry equipment
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IDS has been providing operational reporting solutions to the upstream oil and gas industry for more than twenty years. In that time, we have helped more than 120 companies across the globe to capture, analyze, and report on their operational data. We have reported on more than 150,000 operations on nearly 500 rigs.

Our solutions are completely web-based and fully customized to meet the unique requirements of each company’s operating environment. Providing a wide scope of capabilities including daily drilling, completions, geology reporting, cost analysis, rig monitoring and operational planning, we create value by allowing companies to understand their key performance indicators in order to make better decisions.

Seven years ago, we embarked upon the challenging journey into data visualization and analytics. We set up a small agile team with the task of building dashboards, bespoke reports, and the ability to interact with data stored on our servers. This project was designed on our previous technology stack, which rendered our visualizations in flash. Shortly after Steve Jobs entitled his open letter “Thoughts on Flash”, it was time for us to shift technology…

After a lengthy investigation into embeddable reporting, visualization, and data interrogation technologies, we selected TIBCO Jaspersoft. Harnessing the multi-tenancy and embeddability of Jaspersoft, we could very quickly deliver pixel-perfect reports and dashboards to our end users. Additionally, by using JasperReports, we reduced the report generation time from an average of 83 seconds in our legacy system to 8 seconds. We are now in the process of recreating more than 1,000 reports in Jaspersoft Studio, thus not only providing our clients with faster information, but also with reports that look aesthetically pleasing. To date, we have discovered that it takes a similar amount of time to create reports and dashboards (in comparison to our legacy system), however we are continually optimizing this process and the team is learning new things every day.

Furthering the use of Jaspersoft Studio, we have created many Custom Visualisation Components (CVC) that are commonly used within oil and gas. Wellbore schematics, safety pyramids, histograms, and parallel coordinates have been developed by our team and released through JasperReports Server whereby our customers can run our custom-built visualizations on their data.

Over the past three years, the oil and gas industry has seen the biggest downturn to date with more than 440,000 jobs lost worldwide at the end of 2016. As the industry begins to adapt to the ‘lower for longer’ mentality, many oil companies are looking at digital technology for answers. With less people to perform day-to-day tasks, operators are looking to automate manual work by using technology efficiently (typically moving from MS Excel to Web-Delivered Data management). To that end, Jaspersoft applications have become invaluable in our capability suite, allowing us agility in content creation, data manipulation, and speed of deployment.

The customer need for digitization coupled with our capabilities in reporting, data modelling, analytics, visualization, and data science creates a substantial platform for future growth and development.

To learn more about IDS and its operational reporting solutions for upstream oil and gas, we invite you to join TIBCO’s webinar with Colin on July 11th, 2017. Register now.

And for more information, contact Colin directly at IDS at cdawson@idsdatanet.com.

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Colin joined IDS whilst completing his first degree in Computer Science (hons) as a junior developer. In this role, Colin was part of the VisNet data analytics team, whereby responsible for implementing and delivering upstream intelligence solutions. Over the following 7 years, Colin has been involved in many projects, including the development of a data sharing benchmarking community and a self-service analytics platform. Most recently Colin is working on a part-time MSc in Data Science and is now the Regional Manager at IDS covering Europe & Africa. Colin’s passions are rooted in predictive analytics and the associated use within the Oilfield. He brings over 10 years of experience to every client interaction.