Drilling management: Stop fixing the problem!

Drilling managers are facing increasing pressure to meet performance goals, which means that decisions about how to build the best drilling plans and schedules must focus on continued optimization of these goals. This is not possible to do without the right tools.

Much effort goes into creating baseline drilling schedules; after all, they determine the operational key performance indicators (KPIs), such as the cost of operating the rig fleet and the production volume or number of wells brought online. But things start to change the moment a schedule is put into production, and the utility of even the most carefully prepared drilling schedule starts to degrade: the weather does not cooperate, completion equipment is not available when needed, a well does not meet expectations, field development changes its opinion about a drilling sequence, and so on.

As a result, drilling managers must continually reschedule. What happens to the KPIs then? Because of high time pressure, the rescheduling effort does not receive the same care as that of creating the baseline drilling schedule. The focus is on “fixing the problem” and keeping operations running. Often, the unplanned events cause cascading problems that complicate the resolution effort. There is simply no time to also be clever about the performance goals.

Nor is it possible. Rescheduling is difficult and requires a scheduling optimization tool to do well, not just a planning board, a whiteboard, a spreadsheet, or a scheduling support tool. What is needed are more sophisticated tools that propose the best possible actions (taking operational complexity into account), and that treat scheduling as a sequence of decisions in a dynamic environment. Such tools provide top-line impact by ensuring that schedules are always aligned with corporate key performance goals while minimizing operational disruptions (DSO/Upstream, which used to be called Actenum RAS, is a good example of such a tool). As Paul Maurer mentioned in his post last week, without taking into account key performance goals, operations managers will not be able to make effective resource allocation, scheduling, and maintenance decisions.