Developing a new drilling portal the agile way
Building a bot to do away with 18 emails a day
Developing a new drilling portal the agile way
Building a bot to do away with 18 emails a day
Overview
Custom-built apps often prove lower cost when the requirements only become clear as you start building; working agile is crucial, as this Norwegian drilling team found out.
6,000
Number of emails received per year requiring manual extraction and processing - now automatically pulled into the drilling portal
Problem: A sea of data buried in inboxes, impenetrable and yet potentially hiding issues and problems.
The client was in a drilling function for a major Norwegian operator struggling with information. The often quoted problem of struggling to get hold of the right data was compounded by a challenge of aggregating information at the right level, specifically operational summaries for managers.
A manager responsible for a drilling programme of multiple wells needs to be able to quickly get a picture of what’s going on and where to intervene or probe further. In our client’s case eighteen emails a day were being sent with report attachments in excel, word and powerpoint.
Solution: A custom-built bot to surface data at the right level for decision-makers
Our first instinct was to see if an existing solution existed to take these emails and pull them into something that a drilling manager could use. The closest we found was a spam filter, but even that didn’t quite work as needed.
So we recommended custom-build. Clients quite rightly worry about custom-builds because of unpredictable costs and interoperability with other systems. But our experience persuaded them that we could address both points by working agile and by leaving their data in its source location.
Working with the client over a series of design sprints, we developed a bot that could scan relevant emails, and pick out specific data, classifying according to rules and attributes, to present summary data personalised for different drilling managers on a single portal.
Impact: Rapid deployment and a new model for development
Over the course of a few weeks, we built a proof of concept that we were able to test with users, adjust and refine for wider rollout.
Within a month, managers were no longer relying on data in their eighteen emails each day, and instead were only relying on the Drilling Portal for information.
This was four years ago – and since then Eigen has been collaborating with the client team in this agile manner every month to add new features and data sources to the Drilling Portal. At last count there were twenty data sources being fed into the Drilling Portal, keeping drilling managers up to date with their well programmes, helping them make faster better decisions, as well as seeing their impact in one single place.
This custom application has proven its value many times over, primarily because of the agile approach we have taken with the client, with close one team collaboration, rapid prototyping and frequent user engagement and testing.
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Clients
Over the past fifteen years, we have worked with many of the major oil and gas operators. We are trusted as engineering experts who deploy digital technologies to create value.
“I especially appreciate Eigen’s willingness to find solutions.
They are always dedicated to providing cost-effective solutions for their customers.”
Espen ErichsenVar Energi Norway 
"By digitizing the production surveillance processes, we have eliminated a lot of time spent with spreadsheets and integrated data from various operational data sources. Now our engineers have more time to focus on optimizing production.
With this cloud-based platform our engineers can continue to work remotely, and it makes it easy to keep everyone in the company informed."
Peter DabrowskiDigital Transformation – subsurface lead at Wintershall Dea With this cloud-based platform our engineers can continue to work remotely, and it makes it easy to keep everyone in the company informed."
"What makes Eigen standout is the thought to the end-user experience; they care about the solutions they create and how they can be implemented sustainably to add value to the business."
Lewis VincentBP - Regional Readiness Lead – Mauritania & Senegal 
"We are proud to have developed and launched this portal in collaboration with Eigen. Its users will now have much easier access to the correct information and an enhanced ability to access it, alongside a reduction in inbox clutter. The portal will go a long way towards making platform operatives more efficient and helping them to spend less time looking for information. In the near future we plan to add further digital functionality enhancements to the platform."
Martin WestengLundin’s Project Lead 
"The Panel gives real-time visibility of barrier status and hence provides a step change in Eni Norge’s ability to understand, prioritise and act on major accident risk."
Live FornesEni’s HSE Project Manager 