Faced with the prospect of drilling thousands of new wells, this Houston-based company needed to resolve its overtaxed AFE process issue at the enterprise level.
Solution Benefits
- Tracks each AFE through its life cycle, increasing the reliability of the process
- Improves AFE approval turnaround time by 30%
- Establishes a standard company-wide AFE approval process for all capital expenditures
Project Summary
Based in Houston, this independent energy company has embarked on an aggressive drilling program estimated to result in the drilling of thousands of wells over the next three years. To handle the expanding drilling, the company had instituted policies that compel its asset teams to follow an extensive and complex process for authorization for expenditure (AFE) approval. The existing AFE approval process was paper-intensive and largely manual, and was already creating decision bottlenecks and increasing project costs. Further, faced with the prospect of drilling thousands of new wells and the added strain on its already overtaxed AFE processes, the company realized it needed to resolve its AFE problem at the enterprise level. After evaluating a number of off-the-shelf software packages for AFE workflow, the company’s turned to Stonebridge to help it build a custom AFE solution that leveraged existing technology investments. Stonebridge designed, developed, and implemented a custom workflow-based solution for the AFE process, including approvals, status tracking, annotations, and archival of artifacts and documents.
The solution has three core components:
- A custom user interface built on Microsoft’s .NET framework, that is easy to use by the wide range of participants actively engaged in the AFE process, from geologists and drilling engineers to executive management.
- Workflow automation that precisely tracks the progress of a specific AFE, which increases overall process efficiency and accountability and enables management to quickly pinpoint exactly where a specific AFE is in its approval process.
- Document management capabilities including a central repository for all AFE documentation and document transformation that instantly converts AFE-related artifacts – seismic reports, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, .tif files, etc. – into a single PDF file.
The system automatically updates the master PDF file each time a new artifact is attached to the AFE. Once the AFE workflow is complete, the PDF is automatically stored within the document repository and placed in its associated well file.
Next Step
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