Walking around a typical oil & gas HQ or field office will inevitably reveal stacks of paper on the desks of energy professionals, right next to mugs of coffee. Whether those docs are land records, well files, invoices, contracts or any number of oil & gas document types, coffee rings aren’t uncommon or even a spill. Whether sitting on desks or in filing rooms, these documents contain valuable energy data, and in addition to risks posed by coffee, it’s easy for paper files to be lost, lose pages, or get stolen.
In oil & gas, “going paperless” seems to have stalled out with companies receiving record amounts of documents. IT research leader Gartner estimates that 80% to 90% of new enterprise data is unstructured, i.e., documents of some form and growing at a rate of 3X. IDC, another IT researcher, also estimates that only 10% of unstructured data is actually stored digitally and even less effectively analyzed. Energy has a paper problem that erodes productivity and the bottom line.
Scanners are abundant and cheap these days, ironically sitting right next to those stacks of paper with coffee rings. Copy machines also offer a simple document scan function with a menu of options on where to send it (just scan and have that doc sent right to your inbox). When the piles of paper get high enough, many energy companies turn to one off digitization projects either using internal resources who really don’t have the bandwidth or using an outside vendor. But paper persists because digitization is treated as a project, strategy to organize digital docs is lacking, and outside vendors lack the energy expertise to understand what they are scanning (giving as much attention to a lease as they do to a well log).
To succeed in a world that is increasingly data driven, thrive, and survive, your team needs to view digitization as a critical operational capability that impacts every facet of the organization. Like going to the gym, project-oriented digitization is like working out once a month when you need to be exercising digital muscles every week – that’s building digitization into your corporate DNA.
No document left behind! With a digitization partner like Pepper Energy Partners who is fluent in energy, managing digitization chaos suddenly becomes effortless as the steady flow of documents is transformed into valuable data – in the back office, field, and mail room. We deploy advanced OCR and AI technologies to accurately extract meaning from your documents, provide solutions to effectively organize and search, and support your day to day operations. Got boxes of M&A data gathering dust in the storage room? No problem!
