TAQA answers business questions with speed and accuracy
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TAQA North, the North American upstream division of the Abu Dhabi national energy company, is among Canada’s top 12 largest oil and gas producers with 3.5 million acres of mostly undeveloped reserves. Growth by acquisition has brought them to production levels of 88,400 boe/d in the third quarter of 2009. Challenge Because of the data incompatibilities resulting from acquisitions, combined with the disparity between departmental data, not even the most basic business question could be answered with any authority. The company was wasting time and resources even trying, and the answers weren’t accurate. Solutions
Results
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"No question has stumped us yet"TAQA, Abu Dhabi’s national energy company, has broad, global interests: power generation, combined heat and water, desalination, upstream oil and gas, pipelines, services and structured finance. And like any global company with diverse focus areas, its strategy must guard against fracturing under its own breadth. Operational integration is an important part of TAQA’s strategy that helps to corral its separate businesses into contributing to corporate success.Integration as a key competitive advantage extends to the North American upstream division, TAQA North, where connecting systems and information is the task of Synergy business intelligence software. Immediate business answersUsing Synergy business intelligence software, TAQA North can answer business questions on anything from well count to budget variance. “No question has stumped us yet,” says business development and financial analyst Joel MacLeod. “Synergy quickly connects to and pulls data from all of our databases. It gives us reports in minutes that used to take months.”Overwhelmed with requests for information and reports from offices in many different countries including head office in the UAE, TAQA North needed a simple way of creating reports based on consistent and trustworthy data. Now when people ask McLeod’s group for reports, “we just hit the 'play' button.” Rolling in new productionOver the years, TAQA North had grown steadily by acquisition but still found an accurate well count out of reach. “The president was getting 10 different figures,” says MacLeod. “Ultimately, he accepted the well count out of Synergy because we could demonstrate that it was built on a clean and complete data trail.”Taking the reports native to Qbyte, Outlook, Hyperion, Infomaker, and Access systems and manually consolidating the data into spreadsheets was time consuming and plagued with reliability, completeness, and accuracy issues. Adding any new data just compounded the problems. When TAQA North replaced this process with Synergy’s automated data consolidation, it dramatically reduced time and effort and cranked up data validity. “Because Synergy pulls data directly from the data source, its report sequences let us quickly integrate critical corporate data from acquisitions,” says MacLeod. “This means that all new production is accounted for and immediately rolled up into overall profits.” Counting wellsJoel MacLeod, who joined TAQA through its acquisition of PrimeWest Energy, has lived through both sides of an acquisition. His experience with Synergy during previous PrimeWest acquisitions cemented his trust of the product.At the time, the PrimeWest CFO needed to know the number of wells the company owned to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. Like any energy production company, PrimeWest’s well list varied from finance to land to reserves to production. To determine an accurate well count, TAQA brought in Synergy, and the GuildOne team began running reports within three days. The UWI comparison and well count complete, the company branched off into many other reports. Wide range of insight“All oil and gas companies could benefit from a lot of information that they’re not getting right now,” says MacLeod. “Knowing where they’re generating the most production, spending the most capital, getting the most upside, where their wells are and should be, where supplier volume could lead to discounts: all of this insight lends itself to profitable decisions.”The company is using Synergy reporting sequences in many departments including Land, Operations, Finance, Reserves, and Budgeting. Besides tapping its own data for insight, TAQA also mines public data for competitive information. “Because of GuildOne’s industry focus, the sequences required very little customization—they are largely plug and play,” says McLeod. While he usually has four or five requests for ad hoc reports per day, he also runs regular reports, including: Daily production: For this core business function, TAQA had three separate field views that didn’t always match. Synergy now pulls daily production volumes from the field views together with budget and actuals instances from Qbyte. Royalty entitlements: Identifying uncollected royalties can have a significant cash upside for energy producers. TAQA discovered in excess of $2 million in missed revenues using the Synergy WellSync sequence. This application crawls data in the company’s land system (CS Explorer), compares it to public entitlement records (IPL), and looks for any corresponding revenue collection in Qbyte financials. Processing fees: This sequence takes agreements on processing fee collection from TAQA North’s CS Explorer and compares it to Qbyte financials to find out if the fees are being collected. Capital reporting: The president receives a regular integrated performance report that includes capital efficiencies and AFEs (authorizations for expenditure), approved and overspent. Information is summarized to the corporate level but drillable to the field level. Working interest: Synergy compares data from different departments to determine an authoritative working interest for each well. Finance: Many areas require financial information for many purposes, including contract negotiation with vendors, the cost centre detail associated with a given well to calculate operational netbacks, and divestitures based on a custom report showing which areas are most and least profitable. These are just a few of the reports, which also include a chart of accounts, cost centre hierarchy and a monthly report on suspended AFE to determine the company’s exposure to unpaid partner share. For McLeod, the big benefits of Synergy at TAQA are “time gained, consistency and, occasionally, a million dollar insight.” Working with SynergyAlthough he had no technical background, McLeod has become the de facto point person for business intelligence at TAQA North. “I’m self-taught, and I learned Synergy quickly because it is so easy to work with.”Connecting to data sources has not presented problems for Synergy, whether internal TAQA systems or external data. Internal systems include Qbyte, Hyperion, AFE Navigator, PEEP, CS Explorer, FieldView, Prism, and Roughneck. Public data residing in IPL was also mined. “The only problem we encountered was in trying to connect to proprietary data that explicitly denies us access.” |
