Denver-based TransZap unit, Oildex, has just announced TrendX, a business intelligence tool for oil and gas drilling and production operations. TrendX is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, with data and applications residing on Oildex servers.
SpendWorks
TrendX, an add-on to Oildex’ SpendWorks e-payable system (Oil ITJ Vol. 11 N° 2), is used by engineers, CEOs and accountants to gain real time visibility into their company’s current and historic costs, enabling them to make well-informed bottom-line decisions.
Flanagan
Transzap president Peter Flanagan told Oil IT Journal, ‘TrendX is a packaged business intelligence solution tuned for oil and gas. There is no need for the expensive customization that goes with a Hyperion or Cognos-type deployment. Now expenditure and budget comparisons are available instantly to every decision maker in the company—from pumper to president.’
Abysmal
‘The oil business has an abysmal record in this area. Summary information from fields and wells is often only available ninety days after the fact! Analysis also relies on manual data entry and futzing in Excel. The irony is that all the information needed for real time decision making is there. What’s been missing is a way of tying it all together into a data mart.’
Negative cash flow
‘A typical operations engineer is trying to maximize production and minimize spend on maybe 100 wells. TrendX lets him spot problematic wells and shut them in before they start generating a negative cash flow.’
Pivot table
TrendX simplifies pivot tables and makes them usable by field personnel and managers. The package supports triggers and can issue warnings to users who subscribe through the web or by email.
Fuzzy logic?
We asked Flanagan if the package allowed for data mining of the whole Oildex database. The answer was no. ‘There is strict segmentation of data from individual clients. This is why the industry now accepts ASP*. Most of our customers are publicly traded companies and their first concern is for a SOX-compliant solution (SpendWorks recently received SAS 70 certification). But it would be nice to mine public data sets or for industry to share data for such evaluations.’
* Application service provision.
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