Faster performance
More business opportunities
Greater industry influence
Optimizing profitability and growth
Quorum Software (Quorum) is the global software leader dedicated to the energy industry. As a worldwide leader in digital transformation for the industry, Quorum enables energy organizations to optimize profitability and growth at a time when the industry is facing unprecedented challenges, including ongoing market volatility, greater competition for investment capital, and the overarching energy transition.
In light of these challenges, companies in the energy sector are trying to make better use of their data and gather insights that reduce costs, streamline operations, and preserve profit margins. However, many lack the ability to analyze data from a wide variety of sources, whether it is the systems that monitor field operations or the financial software that runs the business.
Steve Cooper, Vice President of Digital Strategy at Quorum, says, “The first step to making better use of data for energy companies is to standardize and centralize their data. There is a big emphasis on data analytics to assess performance and provide real-time access to that analysis. Predictive analytics is also gaining importance. There is a clear advantage in being able to spot potential sources of failure before they happen, and also to look for opportunities to improve performance over time.”
Cooper has played a leading role in the digital transformation of the energy sector for several years. He was previously CEO at EnergyIQ, a leading provider of data management software for energy companies, acquired by Quorum in 2020. The acquisition included EnergyIQ Well Master (Well Master), software to automate the capture, quality control, and management of multiple sources of technical data across the full well lifecycle. Well Master integrates with Quorum’s upstream software suite, including land, accounting, drilling and completion, and document management.
A more flexible approach for managing data
Elastic plays a central role in the Well Master solution. “To store Well Master data, we use the industry-standard PPDM (public petroleum data model) on a relational database. But this presented two challenges,” says Cooper. “First, the volume of data was starting to impact search, retrieval, and visualization performance negatively. Second, the data was becoming more complex and changing at a very rapid rate. We needed a more robust and flexible approach for search, visualization, and analysis.”
Now, master data from the PPDM server is loaded into Elastic and integrated with transactional data from the Quorum application suite, which dramatically improves data search performance. “With some of our more complex queries, Elastic performs 100 times faster,” says Cooper. “The even greater advantage is that we can now perform queries and manage data in a way that simply wasn’t possible with the previous architecture. It’s immensely valuable.”
We were blown away by the performance of Elastic. It was just instantaneous, even though we were dealing with vast quantities of data.
Another feature that attracted Cooper and his team was Elastic’s spatial query capability. “We now have a map interface that's lightning-fast and can display hundreds of thousands of well spots and well paths,” he says.
There was also a major improvement in data quality. “Previously, when we validated data quality within the PPDM relational model, we had to run hundreds of rules, and it would take ages to get the results back. Now we can run the data quality rules as we load the data into Elastic and analyze the results in real time.”
There was also a major improvement in data quality. “Previously, when we validated data quality within the PPDM relational model, we had to run hundreds of rules, and it would take ages to get the results back. Now we can run the data quality rules as we load the data into Elastic and analyze the results in real time.”
Elastic gives us a platform for advanced analytics that everyone is looking for.
Elastic is now used to integrate data from applications in the Quorum suite. “Elastic and Quorum are such a powerful combination we call it the ‘energy data platform of the future’,” says Cooper. “It’s much more than a data lake or data warehouse. The data is quality checked and can be used for advanced analytics with complete confidence.”
Clearer ROI insights
Elastic helped Quorum create a single location to host all the data concerning a particular well and its lifecycle. “Operators can now go to one place instead of six,” says Cooper. “You can ask questions of the integrated data that aren’t possible when you are looking at just one application.”
An example of this is Authorization for Expenditure (AFE) data. If a well has been operating for several years and production is now falling, the exploration company may want to work over the well to restore and prolong production. An important stage in this process is calculating the budget based on return on investment (ROI).
The data needed to make these workover decisions reside in multiple locations, including the budgeting, production, and revenue accounting systems. Quorum can pull all this data together within Elastic and immediately determine the ROI. The results can be presented through Kibana dashboards to visualize and understand the overall picture.
Quorum now has the analytical insights to measure the performance of not just one well but also hundreds in other locations. Cooper explains, “If a well’s production goes up by 10 percent based on a $100,000 investment, and the ROI is 45 days to break even, you can assess others with a similar production profile and predict the ROI across all these installations.”
These if-then scenarios enable Quorum to add value to its business workflow software. For example, one Quorum customer with more than 1,000 shallow wells uses Well Master to identify which wells need to be reworked, which is an expensive process. The software gives them far greater confidence in the investment.
Setting new standards in oil and gas
Elastic also helps position Quorum at the forefront of an important new Open Group data standard in the energy exploration and production sector. Called the OSDU Forum , the initiative is an international group of oil and gas operators, technology providers, and universities building a cloud-native data platform for the oil and gas industry.
Elastic is one of the few technology providers invited to join the forum because its protocols and standards match closely with the evolving OSDU reference architecture. For instance, Quorum has created data objects in Elastic, the same approach the OSDU takes to support data integration and analysis.
Most recently, Cooper and his team uploaded a set of OSDU data into Elastic and created a toolkit so that clients can test the standard and explore its potential. “Elastic makes OSDU more manageable,” says Cooper. “This opens the door to future business as it gives us a head start in the provision of solutions based on OSDU.”
Most of all, Cooper stresses the openness and flexibility of the Elastic platform.
We work with many different platforms, from relational databases to cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and AWS. Elastic enables us to co-exist in all these environments so that we can provide our customers with the benefits of innovation while integrating with their existing systems.
Cooper is anxious to refine and enhance the Quorum platform by adding more Elastic products and solutions as Quorum continues its Elastic journey. The flexibility of Elastic coupled with the company’s products and services are already fueling customer success and helping Quorum customers harvest more energy resources.
