Operations Management Module, Part IV
Producer Operations
It is through the Producer Operations interface of the Operations Management module that the user will be able to access the aggregate data of the entirety of their interests in their various Joint Operating Committees. This view contrasts with the similar interface available when the user drills down to an individual Joint Operating Committee. It is here that we see the two distinct and operationally diverse perspectives of how the Operations Management module prepares for both the producers as corporations and as participants in a Joint Operating Committee.
Access to the Operations Management module within the producer, would be tightly assigned and applicable to those that are concerned with ensuring that they attain the highest level of profitability everywhere and always from their operations. Exposure of the firm's data and information contents under Producer Operations shows the majority of the modules of the Preliminary Specification reporting through this portal view. The purpose in this module is to combine the business of the oil & gas business with the operational control and technical areas and the deployment of their resources etc. Populating the appropriate decision makers with the actual, factual data and information that is the basis of their performance. Determining from these factors what decisions are that need to be made, when and how they’re to be implemented.
Please note that People, Ideas & Objects have determined that the data and information of the producer firm demands a higher classification of security than what the Joint Operating Committee does. The difference is the producer information is contained for their eyes only, and only to a small subset of authorized individuals. The Joint Operating Committee in many cases deals in publicly available information and any proprietary data that it may have is shared amongst the members of the Joint Operating Committee. It is also recognized that the Joint Operating Committee information will reflect the gross expenditures and revenues of the property as well as the specific producers interest share of those costs and revenues.
People, Ideas & Objects have been critical of the fact that “recycle costs” and independent engineering reports are depended upon far too heavily to make business decisions. However, what is it that they’ll use when the business information provided to them is more corporate in nature, reflects estimates of the costs of overhead and does not represent any allocation of the capital costs as a monthly cost, or ever. Combining the business, operations and technical data, information and resources of the producer firm is what is needed to be achieved in order to resolve the issues that have manifested themselves into the damage and destruction that’s been caused. If there is a culprit in this it is the inadequacy and poor quality of the accounting data and information, producer ERP systems and the organizational structure which is predominately derivative of what existed in the 1960s. And as we’ve repeatedly stated, the obscure and opaque nature of this has been deliberate and orchestrated by the producer officers and directors for their personal financial advantage. When such damage is done to an industry, where nothing is done to remediate these issues, where the calling is to muddle through, where only scapegoats, dishonesty and blaming are provided and the one specific group who have the fiduciary responsibility, authority, accountability and resources to deal with the issues. And it is only that group that benefits financially over all others? If you were in that group, what level of accountability would you seek to instill within the organization you’re responsible for?
We should take a moment here and understand that the source of this issue and the lack of accountability is the cultural means of oil & gas operations throughout North America. It is therefore going to be the point of greatest resistance in terms of the pushback and force applied by the status quo to maintain their turf. We need to take note and understand the significance of the Operations Management module in terms of the need to forcefully amend this culture of oil & gas and eliminate what exists culturally today. This will be one of the points of greatest resistance during developments of the Preliminary Specification. McKinsey notes in a February 28, 2014 article Change Leader, Change Thyself.
The Producer Operations are the portal for producer firms to have the actual, factual, timely and accurate data and information brought together in one area. It is not an original source of any of this information, all of it is drawn from other modules of the Preliminary Specification, other systems of the producer firms, Joint Operating Committees and public sources. A source of unimpeachable facts of the state of affairs that can be relied upon and decisions based upon. It is also a means to control the operation with our Industrial Command & Control and implementation of IoT to conduct any of the actions necessary to remediate issues, exercise opportunities, to innovate and ensure profitability is earned.
If we look to the future and the changes being implemented and opportunities created through the development and implementation of the Preliminary Specification. As noted with the Internet of Things, Swarm network and Oracle’s comprehensive and mature technologies, the shared and shareable nature of the administrative and accounting capabilities and capacities of the service providers, their implementation of an advanced specialization and division of labor and the challenging and difficult future that the oil & gas industry faces in the next 25 years. We see the need for these changes first and foremost. The demand to organize these in order to capture them. However what we also see is an exponential increase in the volumes of data and an order of magnitude of complexity. If natural gas prices are subject to overproduction in early 2023, after all that we have been through, after all that is happening in the marketplace at that time, after all the assurances they had things under control, we find the Officers and Directors do not have a capacity, capability, willingness or desire to even admit they have an issue. Change is inevitable in some form. We can orchestrate it constructively with deliberate actions such as what People, Ideas & Objects et al describe. Or we can accept what the foreign sources of oil & gas will define as the limits to our economy.
When our service providers are providing objective, standardized data and processes they provide industry with a method of measurement, understanding, assurance, accuracy and timeliness that would not be possible without them. As a shared resource the costs of the service providers will be substantially less than what is required to build and maintain similar internal capabilities for each individual producer. Standardized and objective administrative and accounting doesn’t affect the competitiveness of the producer firm. What will be the producer's competitive nature is the strategy, land & assets and coordination of the markets earth science & engineering capacities and capabilities and how they’re profitably implemented.
Standardized, objective data and information in the administrative and accounting components across the industry will assist producers to resolve performance and innovativeness on that shared understanding. A necessity if only for the fact that, when the determination of the standardized, objective accounting states that a Joint Operating Committee is not producing a profit. The producer will know that it is in their best interest to shut-in that production to maximize their corporate profitability, save their reserves for the time when they can be produced profitably, ensure the costs of their reserves do not have to incur the additional costs of any future losses, minimize the production and storage costs and remove the marginal production from the commodity markets. That indeed the assessment it was unprofitable was on the same standard, objective method that all of North American production was.
Financial Marketplace
The purpose of the Operations Management module is to provide producer staff in the areas of the business access to the information they need to operate. This will include the standardized, objective financial, operations and technical information. Access to the necessary information may be limited here as the Financial Marketplace module, from the producer perspective, is focused more towards the corporation's cash and financing needs. It is not, as it is conceived here, an accounting information module. There will be a greater role for this section of the module in the individual Joint Operating Committee sections as the cash balances, inventories and cash calls for their information. The ability to execute transactions such as cash calls should be a feature.
The Financial Marketplace module, just as the Resource and Petroleum Lease Marketplace modules use the Marketplace Interface. The Marketplace Interface is a virtual representation of these three markets in a simulation with individuals participating as avatars of themselves. The ability to conduct and engage participants within the various marketplaces to conduct business is fully supported by the Marketplace Interface and is part of the ERP capabilities provided by the Preliminary Specification. The importance of the Marketplace Interface is not necessarily fully understood and comprehended at this point in time and place. I see this as a new opportunity and medium in which people are able to engage with the full support of a business environment available to them. Something that falls within the immediacy of a telephone conversation with another individual and a meeting arranged next week with all hands. The Marketplace Interface provides a more dynamic environment that is able to fulfill immediate needs with many supported by that business environment.
The most valuable and important aspect of our Marketplace Interface is in the form of the two critical elements of economic development that we’ve lost as a result of software deployment across the globe in the form of the Internet. Serendipity and spontaneous order are unable to happen when participants are located in remote locations thousands of miles away from each other. With the Marketplace Interface, virtual real estate can be established by vendors and participants to demo their products and services, participants at those demos may discover one another and find similar needs. Either provide feedback to the vendor to their needs or innovate upon products that are different from what is demonstrated, but can use some conceptual difference that the vendor has demonstrated in their own product or service. Innovation is iterative and the foundations of the organizations and facilities of those organizations are critical to the success and failure of their innovativeness.
Resource Marketplace
How are operations to be conducted? Who is available? Who is selected? These are the questions that are asked and answered through the Resource Marketplace module. Having a global view of the producer's operating environment the user will be able to engage tactically and strategically to ensure profitability is first and foremost in the minds of everyone involved including the service industry, within the producer firm, Joint Operating Committee and elsewhere.
The Resource Marketplace module has strong connections with both of the Preliminary Specifications Research & Capabilities and Knowledge & Learning modules. The two modules that are involved in the development, in this case, of the producers competitive advantage of their coordination of the markets earth science & engineering capacities and capabilities. And the deployment of those resources into the Joint Operating Committees they participate in. To innovate efficiently. Which means they don’t repeat mistakes repeatedly throughout the organization and then again two years later. That not everyone in the organization is involved in chasing ideas. And deployment of resources in new and innovative ways is only conducted in tried and tested developments.
Oil & gas has a resource constraint problem in the engineering and geological sciences that has been identified but remains unresolved. The age of the current mind trust is rapidly retiring and the intake from universities is inadequate to replace them. There is also the fact that each incremental barrel of oil & gas produced demands more engineering and geology in order to produce it. The expectation that we will sustain energy independence. Rebuilding and refurbishing are also demands on these technical resources. However, first we have to overcome the difficulties in the industry today and engineers and geologists will be at the forefront of the future of the industry and its innovations.
The Preliminary Specification has solved the issue in the following ways. Specialization and the division of labor are both the solution and the aggravating factor in the future. To resolve the issue, specialization is the only method capable of satisfying the type of resource issue industry faces. That, we believe, will only lead to the point where each producer will be uncommercial in their attempt to maintain their just-in-time earth science and engineering capacities and capabilities. The scope and scale of these needs will outweigh their commercial viability. Therefore the deployment of specialized providers through the industry to fill out the generic processes involved in the sciences will need to be established. These will be sourced as required by each Joint Operating Committee and cost into the program. The producer will in turn be able to become highly specialized in an area that they will be able to build value for their land & asset base. And in addition, able to deploy their capacity and capability as a resource back into the industry as a service provider to defer the costs of maintaining, enhancing and expanding that capability.
Industrial Command & Control
Superimposed across the producer and service industry population are generic classifications of roles and responsibilities of the professions involved in the exploration and production process. These generic roles, responsibilities, authorities and accountabilities can be assigned to those that qualify and are therefore able to undertake that task within a producer firm or Joint Operating Committee. Using the additional facilities of the Work Order and Job Orders documentation of the work, its assignment and completion will be available.
Additional features such as delegation of authority and other enhancements are included in the Industrial Command & Control system of the Preliminary Specification. Consistent with the method People, Ideas & Objects has chosen to deal with the resource constraints in the engineering and geological fields. The ability to augment and deploy a producer or Joint Operating Committees capacities and capabilities through the markets of specialized resources is another stated use of the Industrial Command & Control.
AFE
Authority for Expenditures is the standard fare method of establishing budgets for capital outlays, documenting approvals of all participants in the Joint Operating Committees and reporting of those expenditures based on the agreed to budgeted amounts. Supplementals and other features are also included in these processes.
As with all the other processes detailed in the Operations Management module. These are dynamic in nature and populated with live data, or from a business perspective can be easily rolled back by the user to reported data, representing the last accounting periods close or production month information.
Work Order
The Work Order has a dual-role feature and process managed and developed in the Preliminary Specification. The first role is to facilitate working groups within the producer population to conduct research and development on various science and engineering based principles. These working groups have waned in the past few decades and will soon be needed in massive volumes in order to establish a higher level of iteration between the underlying sciences and technologies that are developed, and the market innovations derived from them which will then form the basis of new science, etc. What our Work Order provides is the ability to establish an ad-hoc organizational structure that is flexible enough to consider the various forms of contributions during participation in a working group. To manage these without the bureaucratic legacy that has defeated the purpose in establishing these working groups. When those individuals who participate are audited for vastly longer periods of time than their participation.
The second role of the Work Order is directly related to the deployment of resources in the manner necessary for the producer to acquire and deploy the engineering, geological and service industry resources that are necessary to conduct such work. To budget, to record and accumulate the costs of these deployed resources and to source and coordinate the market for incremental engineering and geological resources.
There is a feature in the Preliminary Specification that is described in the Security & Access Control module that sets out to define the organization's Industrial Command & Control. It is here that the Oracle role system of their database is defined to designate the authority and capabilities of each individual role and or responsibility within the organization and how those are conducted. These roles and their responsibilities are established and standardized on an industry wide basis through our user community. Adopting these in the Work Order we are therefore able to impose an organizational structure over these tactical organizations that will be established in the producer firm’s or Joint Operating Committees being deployed to complete a task. Cobbling together and assigning the appropriate roles, responsibilities and authority of the individuals during their tenure on the specific Work Order.
Purchase Order
This is standard fare purchase order processing that has developed over the past 75 years or more. Oracle Cloud ERP has facilities for these with the ability to be augmented as we need them to fit the oil & gas industry. Changes are included in the area of the Joint Operating Committees capabilities which will include enhanced holdbacks etc.
Job Order
Is another development in the Preliminary Specification. If we looked at the Work Order from the perspective of sourcing and deploying the resources, managing the budget and recording hours for internal and consulting roles being sourced. Then the Job Order is purely a tool to tactically document the execution of commands to fulfill operational tasks in an authorized manner. Simply nothing can be conducted without the appropriate Job Order in hand. It will be complete with the appropriate persons being informed of the Job Order and the ability to designate authorities etc. It is based on its own email system that manages only Job Orders and is established for the documentation and implementation of them.
General
Lastly People, Ideas & Objects are user community based software developments. These are able to develop as the need arises and may include additional features, functions and processes being managed to enhance the Operations Management module. I am only attempting to define the broader picture here, not the specific details.