A leading independent natural gas and oil exploration and production company with onshore operations in the United States and Canada is one of North America’s largest processors of natural gas liquids. The company has IT systems that support both regional and centralized corporate structures.
As an energy provider, the company watches two essential data points on a daily basis – the number of active wells and the amount of production per well. Having timely, accurate and reliable data on these business aspects was essential to the company’s day-to-day operations and its strategic planning for the future.
To provide easy, centralized access to this information, the company constructed an operational data store. This store assembled data from multiple systems to provide consistent reporting from a single system. With the operational data store, analysts could access regularly updated data and produce reports on daily, weekly and monthly schedules.
While the data store was a success in improving access to the data, the company found it also provided faster access to bad data that infiltrated its databases. Analysts soon found themselves having to drill through reports that included overwhelming amounts of inaccurate data, such as wells listed as “producing” that had actually been closed for a decade – or in some cases had never existed at all.
To deliver high-quality data to the operational data store, the company initially explored rebuilding the entire data structure, but the cost and time required made this unfeasible. Instead, the company decided to focus on improving data quality at the source, which would allow for a dramatic increase in data integrity within the target data store.
Deciding on an approach to purge the bad data from its systems, improve the quality of its data and apply its existing auditing rules directly to the data, the company turned to DataFlux.
DataFlux offered this energy company an industry-leading data management technology that allowed it to cleanse, correct and enhance well data kept in the data store – and create an accurate view of that data.
DataFlux offers a single, integrated platform for end-to-end data quality and data integration projects as well as managing critical aspects of enterprisewide data management initiatives. The oil and gas company used DataFlux to create a single set of rules that governed the quality of information in the source systems.
DataFlux allowed the company to integrate data quality into its existing enterprise data warehousing infrastructure. The technology gave business and IT users the ability to coordinate, creating a more rapid ROI for an emerging data governance effort. The ability to show immediate success enabled the data governance group to validate their efforts – and get funding for an expanded initiative.
Beyond the technology, DataFlux also provided the company with the ability to take its existing auditing procedures and translate them into rules to govern its data on an ongoing basis. In this way, the company could directly fix the business issues created by inaccurate data. Even if issues could not be immediately corrected, analysts at least knew that the data was bad – and could fix these records manually if necessary.
DataFlux provided immediate help as the company sought to correct the existing data issues. When the system first went live, analysts saw more than 500 errors a day in their reports. Within a few months, these same reports were showing less than a dozen errors a day. The company moved into a proactive mode for data management, finding and eliminating data management problems upstream – before they could cause business problems.
Correcting these errors has had a real business impact, boosting efficiency in well production by allowing analysts to view better information on what wells are producing. Better data allowed the company to more accurately focus resources and make better business decisions. For an industry where everything relies on production and output, any improvement in this cycle had a positive, lasting effect on the company.