Systematic Management for Drilling Process Improvement

摘要

Today every Oil & Gas company is talking about Digital Transformation as a new mantra, making reference to the more recent digital technologies such as IoT, Big Data, Machine learning, etc. Historically we already have seen such "transformations" in the past, such as agricultural revolution with tractors and such, the industrial "revolution" with assembly line and mass production, etc. There is nothing intrinsically new about the recent "digital revolution" and it is more like a deja vu situation, raising similar questions and some dreadful future scenarios. Using the basic tripod of people-process-technology, I would argue that the people are the same, regardless of the "revolution". The "technology" is just the enabler of the revolution, the same as the tractor or IoT technology. What really matters is the "process" of how people can use the technology to deliver improved results. Hence, this paper looks into the drilling business from a "process management" perspective as a means to effectively use the digital technology currently available. Over the last 100 years, "scientific management" has been used or was used as a basis for many current process management styles. Understanding what has worked and what has failed in the past. Learning from the past, gives us a better model for the process to use the current flood of data measurements. I would like to propose some working models for drilling continuous process improvement, a methodology and some guidelines used.