Speaking at the 2012 TIBCO Spotfire Energy Forum earlier this year, Chevron’s Steve Rees described how Spotfire has been embedded in Chevron’s integrated reservoir analysis and visualization environment, ‘iRave.’ Rees’ unit operates a billion barrel offshore oil field presenting significant reporting and project management overhead and data management challenges. The current state of data management and analysis was deemed inefficient, with complex email and ftp-based workflows and multiple information repositories. Users were accessing and manipulating data in spread sheets which often lead to duplication of effort and time wasted on managing and manipulating data. Enter Spotfire and iRave—and a new user friendly collaborative environment targeting workflows with immediate impact such as daily and historical production monitoring and analysis, reporting and forecasting and more.
iRave combines information from heterogeneous data sources including Oracle tables, map files and network flat files. Information is displayed in 9 panels with over 60 visualizations. Some were customized using Spotfire extensions designed by Troy Ruths. Following initial deployment in 2009, iRave was re-tooled for deployment on Rees’ asset in under four months. In one workflow optimization use case, variance analysis for monthly forecasting has been reduced from 2 hours to 20 minutes.
Chevron suggests some best practices for such development—leverage a multi-disciplinary project team and include a champion from the asset team with knowledge of critical workflows. This targets higher value workflows while limiting the initial scope. Engaged end users positively impacted the design process and improved deployment effectiveness. iRave 2 is being planned with extensions for benchmarking, business plans, reserves and petrophysics.
Scott Reid traced Wood Mackenzie’s history of data delivery—from compact disks, through a web portal to Excel-based delivery and, as of 2012, a ‘new breed of products with embedded Spotfire visualizations.’ Woodmac uses Spotfire to analyze fiscal regimes and to perform competitor analysis. The ‘new breed’ of Spotfire visualizations include a corporate analysis tool, developed in .NET and accessed through the Woodmac Portal. CAT offers analysis of 2,900 companies worldwide which can be sliced and diced into companies, regions and other metrics.
Earlier this year, Woodmac’s Exploration service released a corporate exploration report in Spotfire—the first Spotfire-based deliverable on the Woodmac portal. Other Spotfire-based products are in the pipeline. Reid observed that even an apparently simple concept like ‘government take’ can hide considerable complexity. Tax regimes divvy up fields into different profiles and sizes, other parameters like commodity price scenarios and discount rate assumptions make for some 6.75 million ways to interpret government take. Spotfire has allowed Woodmac to consolidate its discovery dataset and migrate its legacy Excel/VBA offering to a web-based toolset. More from the Spotfire Energy Forum.
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