Data & Analytics Case Study

Digital Strategy Roadmap and Data Foundation Implementation for Energy Company

Client

The client is a leading energy firm specialized in natural gas exploration and production. The company focuses on the acquisition, development, and growth of oil and gas assets, particularly in the Ark-La-Tex region, which includes East Texas, as well as the Mid-Continent and Permian Basin areas. The client emphasizes a commitment to people, technology, safety, environmental stewardship, community enrichment, and disciplined capital allocation.

CLIENT PROFILE
EMPLOYEES: 130+
INDUSTRY: Energy/Oil & Gas
FOUNDED: 2015

Project Scope

The company’s original business model was to acquire, enhance, and sell their oil and gas assets. This is a common business model in the oil and gas industry and organizations will intentionally limit IT investments since those investments will not incrementally improve asset evaluations. As the company succeeded, it grew from 30 to 160 people; however, there are limited IT resources (4) with no application or data support in IT.

The client recognized the situation and engaged Smartbridge to perform an assessment and develop an IT strategy and roadmap to improve the business.

The assessment had 3 primary objectives:

  • Evaluate the current business needs to current IT capabilities
  • Educate the business stakeholders and IT in best practices for leveraging technology as a strategic advantage
  • Develop an IT strategy and roadmap that includes required capabilities, identifies additional processes and systems that must be implemented, and a prioritized list of initiatives based on the digital IT roadmap.

Key Challenges

Our team started by speaking to 40+ people across all business functions to collect input and gain an understanding about the current state of their IT. From this, as well as from various other parts of our assessment, we were able to uncover multiple challenges the organization faced such as:

People

  • Producing key reports is a labor-intensive task as the data is extracted and transformed mostly in Excel and data can be spread between multiple systems
  • Limited use of collaboration tools
  • IT is typically reactive to business needs
  • Total portfolio of application technology is unknown as the business owns the application and data layers
  • Multiple processes are repetitive, manual, and lack documentation

Process

  • Excessive data duplication due to heavy Excel usage
  • Lack of unified data system and single source of truth and data governance
  • IT not involved with software selection
  • Lack of change management and enablement functions

Technology

  • Systems integration is manual or script-based
  • Limited self-service reporting and data access
  • Lack of proper staging-environments
  • Large portion of infrastructure is below recommended spec to perform daily operations
A snapshot of what the client’s current state data architecture looks like

The Smartbridge Solution

The Smartbridge team conducted an 8-week assessment of the client’s current IT state and systems then provided the organization with a digital strategy roadmap and future state recommendations. These recommendations included:

People

  • Augment the IT team with internal or external resources to mitigate capacity and skills shortages
  • Automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks, allowing employees to focus on relevant projects
  • Use Microsoft Teams to increase collaboration across the company
  • Document business outcomes, metrics, and playbook to ensure alignment, consistency, and resiliency
Microsoft Data & AI Solutions Partner
Microsoft Digital & App Innovation Solutions Partner

Process

  • Redesign Invoice Approval process
  • Formalize IT Help Desk Ticketing system to establish internal SLA
  • Establish an IT governance process that includes an IT Executive and Committee to evaluate, direct, and monitor IT
  • Formalize a business continuity and disaster recovery plan – extending the Backup & Recovery effort
  • Improve IT asset lifecycle management

Technology

  • Create a central data repository
  • Extend the use across the company of technologies like Spotfire or Power BI to create reports and analytics
  • Implement document management solution
  • Establish staging/development/QA environments
  • Upgrade current systems and infrastructure specs
  • Implement Zero Trust and Identity Access Management solutions

Success Through a Modernized Implementation

The client was pleased with the assessment that was conducted and the roadmap that was created for them. Smartbridge was then tasked with implementing these recommendations which yielded immense value for the client and allowed them to take their data even further with new solutions for their oil & gas operations.

The main component that solved a lot of the organization’s challenges and gave them the opportunity to innovate even further is a new unified data foundation using Microsoft technologies.

A snapshot of what the client’s future state data architecture looks like

With this new data foundation in place, the client could now have Smartbridge:

  • Train over 30 employees on Power BI, extending the use of the technology across the company
  • Modernize their bottomhole flow process which minimized manual intervention by 40% and reduced manual errors by 80%

  • Automate ESG and invoice tracking processes, leading to a 99% error rate reduction and 24 hours of time saved to reallocate to more strategic tasks.

0
employees trained on Power BI
0%
of manual errors are reduced
0%
error rate reduction

Keep Reading: Cloud Computing and RPA Drive Advanced Multivariate Analysis and BHP Calculations for Energy Firm

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