Data and Digital Transform Oilfield Inspections

EnergyCo*, a leading independent energy company focused on developing oil and natural gas, knew that there was a smarter way to conduct oilfield inspections. Current processes were inefficient, resulting in missed production opportunities and overall revenue loss. With a bold vision to optimize operations with easier access to data, the company enlisted our help building two new digital products.

The oil and gas sector traditionally has been constrained by requiring humans to do inspections. While full automation wasn’t an option, EnergyCo pursued the next best thing—namely, a streamlined way to capture and leverage oil field data so that lease operators could do their jobs more efficiently and become, in the words EnergyCo’s director of data innovation, “the CEOs of their routes.”

Going back to the well

A quick fix from a third-party application wouldn’t enable sufficient customization nor guarantee data safety, so EnergyCo engaged Umbrage, one of our branded service lines, to deliver this new digital platform. The company sought our digital product expertise, including user experience, data science, and product management capabilities, to define and design two digital products that would improve employee performance and boost overall productivity: an electrical submersible pump (ESP) web platform and a dynamic routing (DR) iOS tablet.

Our 10-week “define and design” journey began with site visits to gain an understanding of oilfield lease operators’ daily tasks and challenges, followed by interviews and working sessions to dig deeper. That research formed the bedrock for a product strategy shaped by business goals, value drivers, system requirements, and solutions to operators’ everyday pain points—all with growth and scale in mind. For DR, the goal was to bring enhanced flexibility and customization options to EnergyCo’s field data capture software, while ESP was designed to save time and improve resource utilization.

Our product management and design experts created a “hero path,” or user journey, and embarked on an iterative wireframing process. EnergyCo end users were involved throughout, testing and offering feedback to continually improve the user experience and ultimately inform the final design of the two digital products. Our engineering and data science team worked with EnergyCo to deliver proper data modeling and technical and DevOps architecture to ensure that our product seamlessly integrated into the company’s infrastructure.

Building a truly digital oilfield

A mobile-first design was essential to serve the needs of perpetually on-the-go operators and field technicians. We also learned that users needed to prioritize field routes by both geographical locations and financial opportunities, so we used artificial intelligence to generate routes based on proximity, urgency, and value.

Finally, we designed a user-friendly interface that included task details, progress, and actions such as rescheduling to help operators tick through their inspections more productively.

EnergyCo’s new applications centralized data, enhanced that data’s accuracy, and paved the way for a new standard in digital solutions in the oil industry (which often lags from a tech perspective).

By incorporating data analytics into their decision making, the company instilled confidence in its inspection processes and reduced production time. Ultimately, it also lay the foundation for future cost savings through autonomous operations.

Based on positive user feedback, EnergyCo asked us to keep going. We’re currently industrializing its intelligent well platform, which the company views as a way to achieve its internal goals while tapping a commercial opportunity: By taking the product to market, EnergyCo can unlock new revenue while elevating the industry standard.