Leading Oil & Gas Company Takes Steps To Gain Control Of Their Content

Content Intelligence is seeing rapid growth in Oil & Gas companies across North America. In fact, the Oil & Gas data management market increased from $6.08 billion in 2015 to $21.22 billion in 2020.

Many experts believe that the YOY growth is linked to Oil & Gas regulatory compliance laws. These laws require Oil & Gas companies to track information related to all elements of all processes, or they risk facing stiff penalties. Without the proper structure, a company’s network shares, databases and individual user PCs often become a dumping ground for all types of content.

In order to develop better processes, many organizations decide to implement an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. ECM systems work well with large quantities of data. However, they lack the capability to successfully manage such high volumes of content for searchability, automated workflows, auditing and retention. In general, ECM systems need to be supported with the right tools to produce a complete solution.

Challenge

Prior to developing an ECM strategy, this Oil & Gas Company managed their well related content using multiple data sources and repositories, and multiple inaccessible file formats. In an effort to better organize their content they developed an Enterprise web-based portal as part of their ECM strategy. This portal helped the company to consolidate current data sources/technologies and allowed users to easily access a single source of truth for all well related information.

Despite the portal’s development however, millions of the Oil & Gas Company’s historical well related content remained spread throughout multiple sources, in inconsistent formats. In addition, files that were available in the portal were not easily searchable. It seemed that the portal did not actually provide users with a single source of truth. Staff had no choice but to continue to spend valuable time and resources trying to search for, find and manage their historical and current content.

As a result, the Oil & Gas Company decided they needed a way to migrate the millions of departmental files from multiple sources and various formats into their OpenText system (which was linked to the portal). Moving the files would be difficult. Over the years, without the proper oversight and controls in place, the shared folders had grown unorganized and frustrating to navigate.

The most prevalent problems included:

• Data duplication
• Lack of index/searchability
• Inconsistent folder naming conventions
• Data security, and auditability

While OpenText is one of the largest ECM systems on the market, it requires additional tools or software to standardize file formats or automate searchability prior to the migration process. Therefore, if the company did not find the right tools to support OpenText, they would continue to risk user adoption of the portal. This would significantly impact current and future daily operations, not to mention the company’s ability to successfully comply with industry regulations.

The organization was left with few options. They could:

• Leave the documents “as is” and risk user adoption of their Enterprise Well Portal and overall ECM strategy.
• Perform manual conversion on millions of documents, resulting in massive resource efforts, significant costs and inconsistencies.
• Find a solution that automated their document conversion and uploading of oil-well content as a fully findable resource within their portal.

Solution

After significant product evaluation, the Oil & Gas Company selected Adlib over 6 other software providers. Adlib Transform platform was the only solution that could satisfy this Oil & Gas Company’s explicit needs around classification
and ECM upload.

The success of the project relied on developing a framework that could successfully handle the migration of a specific group of historical well documents. This framework included:

1. Standardization & Capture - Render well related documents into a consistent PDF format and capture the full text content.
   • Render and save all documents in PDF format (regardless of type, layout, or design).
   • Capture the text content with Adlib’s OCR to make the PDFs searchable. This groups related content and supports searchability.
2. Validation, Manual Classification & Upload – Documents are identified, manually classified, and uploaded into OpenText under the appropriate well.
   • Validate the documents that are ready to upload. These documents have the correct document type assigned and have been matched to the correct well identity.
   • Assign document type and well identity manually via picklists that contain a standard set of attribute values.

Conclusion

Moving forward, Adlib Transform scalable platform has helped this Oil & Gas Company in successfully migrating all current and future content ensuring staff has full access to intelligent information that drives their business.