The oil & gas industry has always been digitally savvy but in selective ways. Back in the 60’s, computer was a job title until three story tall digital computing centers took over with their vast banks of real to reel magnetic tape and mainframe computers crunching geophysical data. Fast forward to today where the cloud, edge computing, and AI have unlocked a world of possibilities across the energy enterprise. But despite these digital advancements, why are there so many paper documents still hanging around?
Energy document management has evolved over the decades to a certain limit. Take well files for example (substitute land files or accounting files if you wish). Well File 1.0 was the first generation of physical documents squirreled away in storerooms and filing cabinets. Most energy companies still have a lot of first gen files in addition to Well File 2.0, which is a scanned version of the old school well files. But we treat this second gen just like the first, throwing these files into digital storerooms and digital filing cabinets, e.g., SharePoint, network drives, and personal storage devices. And Well File 2.0 typically limits search to the file name or a few scraps of metadata if you’re lucky because the internal contents of the document haven’t been extracted using OCR (optical character recognition).
To keep pace in a data driven industry, compete, and reduce operating costs, energy companies urgently need to upgrade their v1 and v2 documents to Well File 3.0 (and the same goes for land, accounting, and all the myriad energy document types). Well File 3.0 brings structure to unstructured data and documents by first extracting document meaning and context. This is now possible through AI powered data extraction technology like Thomson Reuters Document Intelligence (previously known as ThoughtTrace). Instead of contending with high error rates from standard OCR, accurate data extraction can be performed on even the most complex doc types, including land files with their varying vintages of courthouse records, complex legal language, faded print, and handwritten notes.
Secondly, Well File 3.0 centrally organizes energy documents with a taxonomy that makes finding, filtering, and searching document contents as easy as using Google. Importantly, building the next generation of energy document management requires the right technologies and services, which is where Pepper Energy Partners comes in.
There’s two sides to the document management coin – on one side is digitization back by a 100% focus on energy doc types, which Pepper has perfected for a decade. And on the other side of the coin are services like implementing your choice of document management technology, creating taxonomies, systems integration, data transformation, and bulk document onboarding from M&A.
Technology agnostic, we give you optionality with our certifications on the leading document management platforms, including Dynamic Docs from Quorum Software, Egnyte, and M-Files. Plus, Pepper is a certified Document Intelligence partner so we can manage your daily ingestion of land records.
Take control of your document management destiny and upgrade to the latest generation of solutions and services with Pepper Energy Partners!
