Around the time Bitcoin was launched in 2009, the oil & gas industry seemed to double down on talk of digital transformation, the digital oilfield, and going paperless. But just as crypto currencies have failed to eliminate paper money, we’re still knee deep in paper across many departments of an energy company. And that’s just fine.
Despite the negative framing of the phrase “go paperless,” oil & gas doesn’t have a paper problem. It’s how most energy professionals get the job done, from the field to the C-suite. If the lessons of going digital have taught us anything over the last 15 years, it’s that it’s not an all or nothing transformation, a binary situation of either being paper-based or digital. But the fact that oil & gas still relies on paper doesn’t mean that we have failed to innovate and embrace new ways of working with technology and data.
So, where has our industry innovated and made significant progress? In a word, digitalization. This encompasses digitization, the process of scanning paper documents, applying optical character recognition (OCR), and extracting metadata so digital docs can be classified and searched. These days, we use AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting and extract meaning from energy documents, not just OCR them. Digitalization also involves using digital technologies to change business processes, improve efficiency, and create new value.
Today, paper and data coexist and often blend together inside workflows. Accounts payable is a great example. Here, an energy company receives a large number of paper invoices from the oilfield supply chain, vendors, and joint operating partners. Digitalization transforms the paper pipeline into a digitized flow of documents, classified and coded for approval routing. This process might be supplemented with a buyer/supplier exchange like OpenInvoice where participants submit digital invoices or JIBs electronically, but there will always be a mix of paper and digital.
Here are just a few other ways digitalization is transforming energy business processes:
Field operations – Extracting cost data from daily drilling reports for timely financial analysis, digitizing field tickets for better line of sight into sales and LOE.
Land and legal – Onboarding vast numbers of leases from mergers and acquisitions to monitor and honor obligations, digitizing contracts to track complex terms and manage the full contract life cycle.
Accounting – Digitizing and automating AP processes for invoices and JIBs, converting non-op revenue statements for timely analysis and tax preparation.
Geoscience – Converting interpreted well logs and seismic sections into digital assets, which many teams still print out on large format plotters.
Over the last ten years, Pepper has partnered with the oil & gas industry on its digitalization journey. We are energy professionals who provide bespoke document management solutions for energy professionals. We understand the significance and criticality of efficiently managing land and well files, expertly processing AP, and capturing the context and meaning of a document, not just handing clients a thumb drive of PDFs. We also build and can manage your digitalization tech stack on leading platforms from Quorum Dynamic Docs, M-Files, Egnyte, and Thomson-Reuters Document Intelligence (formerly Thought trace).
Ready to start your digitalization journey? Reach out now!
