The past couple of years have seen a challenging downturn affect the oil and gas industry. Navigating through cutbacks to budgets and postponed initiatives are now second nature to many professionals. Those who have risen to the challenge are offering creative and innovative solutions. These innovations help to increase automation and offer better integration solutions to improve profits and aid in expansion as the market picks up.

For IT environments across industries, one of the main challenges is the ability to meet the constant need for new extensions and interfaces in their ERP systems and applications to reflect streamlined processes and new workflows. And without an effective infrastructure, oil and gas professionals are constantly creating workarounds to cope with such challenges as:

• A lack of a comprehensive cloud-based strategy. This hinders the ability to streamline the archival process in systems and applications such as Oracle or P2 Enterprise Upstream, crucial documents such as land title documents, allocation network structures, as well as royalty and regulatory information.
• An inability to integrate scanned documents and seamlessly upload them into the system.
• Microservices and application programming interfaces (APIs) are requirements for all software products, but they are unable to connect with the existing systems.

These technical adapters often require a great deal of time and effort to develop, cutting into the ROI and desensitizing decision-makers.

So how can oil and gas professionals avoid being paralyzed in the present or trapped in the past by their IT environments?

Fortunately, there are several options.

• Implement a hybrid enterprise. While it’s crucial you build your IT infrastructure on best-of-breed software, keep in mind implementations require significant capital and a lot of effort. They also carry the risk of becoming “scope challenged” by the time they’re ready for company-wide use due to their long implementation cycles. Conversely, if implementations are fast-tracked, compromises might be necessary as they could affect scope and functionality, additional fragmentation of business processes, data, and any underlying IT infrastructure.
• Design a standard architecture to get different systems connected via the hybrid cloud. It is important to create and leverage microservices and APIs offered with various products. Companies must then use a standard architecture for all implementations. It is best to do this using service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles, which can be complicated.
• Execute in smaller project sections. These small, operations-oriented solutions are quick to implement and allow companies to provide measurable ROI and benefits to stakeholders in a very short period. By focusing on extensions that target specific workflow or process gaps within the business, an IT system can be enhanced to meet larger strategic goals, maximize value, and eliminate waste without straining your budget. The oil and gas industry is dynamic industry with a lot of expansion capability. By focusing on projects that target specific workflow or process gaps within the business, an IT system can be enhanced to meet larger strategic goals, maximize value, and eliminate waste without straining your budget.
• Streamline extensions in a cloud model with out-of-the-box microservices from a third-party expert. This is a powerful way to cut manual tasks. They help your systems run better and stronger, giving the ultimate boost without breaking your budget. They also allow your workers to continue using expert oil and gas applications, such as P2 Enterprise Upstream or Merrick, while also leveraging cloud providers like Box or Google. This can increase productivity and workability across an entire enterprise, letting your workforce of superheroes shine.

As a longtime partner for the oil and gas industry, Value Global has helped companies find success and realize initiatives through all the above strategies. Whether it’s implementing a hybrid enterprise, streamlining a small workflow, or providing SaaS-based products that integrate systems and applications, our goal is to help professionals navigate the downturn and come out with IT environments that are smarter, sleeker, and better than ever.