Entrance to present on Master Data Management (MDM) at PNEC 2014
Entrance is excited to be a sponsor and featured presenter at the 18th International Conference on Petroleum Data Integration, Information, and Data Management taking place in Houston, Texas, May 20-22, 2014 at the JW Marriott hotel.
The 2014 PNEC is a power-packed, two-and-a-half-day technical program featuring 48 in-depth technical presentations and panels led by data management professionals and experts from around the world. The sessions will focus on real-world issues, best practices, developments, and cross-discipline advances that address the ever-expanding and complex data demands in today’s oil and gas industry. Read More
Four Reasons to Consider Software Consulting
Software Consulting and the Right Team
During our ongoing discussion on quality and custom software, Entrance’s software consulting team recently covered what we bring to the table for our clients.
As a buyer, you may have wondered why you should hire an outside programmer versus building an internal team. What follows is a four great reasons why the investment in software consulting is worth it for your company.
Exposure to Many Industries and Practices
As software consultants, we get exposed to many different companies and industries, so part of the value we bring to the table is our diversity of experience. Our clients may be asking for a specific request, in a specific way, because they are unaware of any other way to do things.
We can help them diversify their options by sharing our knowledge and experience from other clients and projects, especially when those clients and projects are in a different industry. Other industries may have been doing something for a long time, and consider it standard practice, but that same process could be a revolutionary innovation in a completely different industry.
As an example, think about FedEx, who applied a hub-and-spoke concept that revolutionized the overnight delivery industry.
Subject Matter Expertise
Yet another way we add value is by becoming a subject matter expert, either for an industry as a whole, for specific operations within an industry, or for a series of technologies. One specific place where Entrance shines in this regard is our deep expertise in oil and gas software and integration solutions.
Then we become advisors, coaches and mentors to our clients, thereby reducing their efforts to make decisions that are right for their company and industry.
Saving Time for the Tasks that Matter
One of the best value-adds our clients have seen from software consulting is that we can improve processes so that they can focus their energy on doing what they do to add value. Usually this is improving workflows or automating data gathering and reporting.
Over and over again, clients tells us, “This isn’t my job, this is just the stuff I have to get out of the way to GET TO my job.” A trusted team of software consultants can help your employees get past those road blocks that waste their time on a daily basis.
Beyond freeing up time that may have been spent on time-consuming tasks that don’t bring value, software consulting can also address problems that have been languishing at your business for a long time.
A lot of times, customers see a need for improvement, but do not have the capability to implement that improvement while also maintaining existing commitments. Frequently, we are in a position to take care of this without interrupting the normal flow of business.
Fresh Set of Eyes
When your company is dealing with a long-standing problem, a fresh outlook may be just what you need to get it solved. Far too often, people cannot get to the root of their own problems, which prevents them from coming up with insight that leads to worthwhile solutions.
Some people may not have a mindset of curiosity, others are uncomfortable with change, and many are too busy to dig deep and solve problems. As a result, companies tend to lean on tired solutions that only half work.
When an Entrance software consultant starts a new engagement, we focus on identifying how our clients deliver value to their customers, and then find the roadblocks that stand in the way of that happening. We use questions and our outsider perspective to break each piece down to its essential components and build it back up again in a way that is novel and valuable.
Turning Your Business Goals into Reality
As your company considers internal versus external resources for software, qualities like domain knowledge, inter-organizational experience, technical knowledge, and providing additional capacity to deliver solutions to match business initiatives should all be considered.
For more on how software consulting can help your company make decisions that are right for the business, check out our series, “Software Selection: Buy versus Build.”
Oil and Gas Software: Top Concerns from Merrick Users
Getting the Most from Oil and Gas Software
A few weeks ago, several Entrance software consultants attended an event on oil and gas software, the Merrick MUG user conference. We’ve already covered this event in a blog post on knowing when to upgrade energy software.
Business Intelligence and ROI: Weighing the Business Value
ROI is King for Business Intelligence, or Is It?
I came across this article on Search Business Analytics today called, “Bow Down to the IT Throne on all Business Intelligence Projects?” The author, Craig Stedman, shared some interesting thoughts on weighing ROI with other business priorities, such as usability or fit with requirements.
Lease Compliance and Custom Software: Eliminating the Single Point of Failure
Onshore Drilling and Lease Compliance
Does your company participate in onshore drilling? If so, you would probably agree that lease compliance is an ongoing issue. Onshore wells are smaller, so you have more of them, with the accompanying lease provisions that your company may or may not have a system for tracking.
SharePoint for Upstream: Dashboards
SharePoint and Your Dashboard
Last week, I started a blog series based on my lunch and learn, “SharePoint for Upstream.” I plan to share a few strategies and best practices that people in Upstream can use to improve the visibility and control they have over their data.
Custom Software Consulting: Excel and Access as Databases
Simple Databases, and When It’s Time for Custom Software
In our custom software consulting work, we see a lot of companies using Excel or Access as their primary database. Both of these options have their pro’s and con’s.
Tableau Consulting: Online Version Released
Tableau Online: Moving to the Cloud
Today, Tableau announced a move to a cloud version of their business intelligence services. According to an article in the Seattle Times, “Tableau is pitching its cloud version as being easier and more flexible for companies to deploy. It doesn’t require software installation and is accessible via most browsers on PCs and tablets.”
Energy Software: Leading Indicators, Lagging Indicators, and Safety Compliance
When it comes to safety for oil and gas, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the intricacies. A culture of safety needs to filter throughout your organization, and this involves having a plan for how to accomplish this.
E&P Data Management: Data versus Information
The past few weeks, we’ve been blogging about some interesting topics related to data management from PNEC’s annual conference. This week, I’d like to share what we learned from a Petroleum Engineer at Saudi Aramco, Omar Akbar. His presentation was called, “Before We Begin to Discuss E&P Data Management: Do We Speak the Same Language?” It was of interest because here at Entrance we talk about data and information a lot, but there is always some confusion about what the difference is. Akbar did a great job laying out the differences, in addition to giving some great pointers on how to make data management work in the E&P space.
Understanding Data, Information and Knowledge for Better Data Management
A few weeks ago, I shared a statistic from Gartner stating 30% of businesses will monetize their information assets by 2016. But many data management projects are unsuccessful because the stakeholders don’t understand their goals or even what data is and how it should be used.
What’s wrong with your dashboard?
When it comes to making informed decisions these days, it really is about surfacing the right subset of information at the right time, with the right purpose. We all know that Business Intelligence and Dashboards manage the process of sifting through and presenting information, but what struck me recently was that, paradoxically, more information can also lead to bad decisions. In fact, these ‘intelligent’ solutions are only at their best if they take human factors into account when looking at information.
Goals change the way you view information
Oil and Gas Compliance Solutions – Creating a Plan
For the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about compliance in Energy. A growing area of concern in the industry, compliance crosses many areas of an oil and gas company – the constant set of changing requirements around safety, tax, land, legal, environmental and other compliance can feel overwhelming. Luckily, while every compliance scenario is different, there’s a way to answer common concerns with a compliance management information framework.
Ready to start thinking about systematic compliance solutions?
Nate Richards Speaks on Lease Compliance at Shale Conference
Nate Richards, President of Entrance, presented a case study on lease compliance at the conference, “Managing Regulatory and Legal Issues in Shale Plays” in Houston, Texas. Nate shared the innovative solution implemented for one shale E&P client. He explained how the platform allows proactive notification about lease compliance and is protecting key assets in multiple domestic shale plays from potential lease jeopardy by improving administration of common shale lease language. The case study included an explanation of industry drivers that are causing a new set of pressures on compliance.Read More
Decide: Your most courageous decisions are your most informed
“We react to what’s in front of us, whether it truly matters or not.” Tony Schwartz, Harvard Business Review Blog.
Know what is most important, and keep that front and center at all times. Your success comes from being one step ahead of the competition and, at the same time, being prepared to react to changing circumstances. Well-informed and agile decisions are essential to your leadership and your team’s success. How do you split your time between two areas of your business that are not performing well? What should be the top priority for your scarce resource? Sophisticated software tools can help your brain get to a good conclusion faster.
Observe: Good Data = Good Decisions
Beat the competition with Custom Applications and SharePoint 2010.
If you look at the way you gather and maintain information about your business, and it involves multiple users entering data by hand, a complicated excel sheet with variants owned by different people, or a highly trained engineer chugging through data for days to create a report, then you could get better quality data faster. Your competition probably already is.
In our last post we talked about how to compete in the fast-paced energy market by making faster, better decisions all the way down the line. With our own Air Force captain on staff, we look at speeding up and improving your decision-making in military terms. Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. Let’s drill down into ‘Observe’ to make sure that you are gathering good data and verifying it. Huge improvements to your bottom line can already happen when you work based on the absolute best observational data.
Records Management in SharePoint
Do you know the value of your business records? Does your business need to comply with federal regulations such as HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley? Do you stand ready for an audit without pulling manpower from daily operational tasks to hunt through piles of unorganized information? An often overlooked business process is that of records management, and understandably so. Until an auditor or lawyer shows up at your door there is typically no immediate consequence of a poor file plan.
SharePoint has the features you need to build a comprehensive and effective file plan to suit your needs. Listed below are some of these features:
SharePoint 2010 and Business Intelligence SQL Server Reporting Services
As a SharePoint consultant, there’s no way I can overstate the power and value of setting up a business intelligence solution in SharePoint 2010. Being able to both visualize business data and make decisions based on that information transforms the software from a document management and collaboration web app to a full-fledged Intranet portal. And if you’re running the SharePoint 2010 software, then you already have all the prerequisites you need to start creating and surfacing reports for a full business intelligence solution.
Most paid versions of Microsoft SQL Server—the database that serves as the backend for SharePoint software—include SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). This is the engine with which reports are generated. Reports live in a Report Library on your SharePoint server, are fed to the SSRS Server for processing, and returned as finished reports.