So, you’ve designed and constructed your onshore facility, and it’s been operational for three or four years.

The facility is operating well and producing (more or less) as expected, but the march of time does not stop. Systems degrade, personnel retire, and technology advances. With these events comes the need to improve operations, make work processes leaner and more efficient, and consider what equipment upgrades most benefit the facility. It’s time for some “home” improvements.

One of the first steps in optimizing an onshore facility is identifying the capabilities of the company and evaluating its operational model. What is its approach to production management and forecasting? What asset and loss management plans are in place? Analyzing these and other associated value-based processes and optimizing them may be all that is needed to produce a noticeable boost in production and reduction in risk. If those process and management refinements are cross-compatible with and can integrate into the functions of other facilities, operational improvements and reductions in cost may occur across an even wider portion of the enterprise.

While evaluating and improving business processes can yield positive results for onshore facilities, further benefits can be garnered by analyzing the facility itself and implementing cost-effective brownfield modifications. For example, 3D laser scans of an entire facility can capture millions of data points, which can then be fed into modeling and simulation software along with other real-time data to evaluate if system components are operating as efficiently as initially proposed. These scans can also provide vital insights into how assets can be better managed.

In cases where quality data about operational aspects of the facility is either spread out over several monitoring stations or doesn’t yet exist, the improvement of digital oil field assets may be in order. Disparate data streams can be integrated with newly-created streams through a data management system, allowing for better optimized real-time analysis and monitoring. Existing systems as well as those receiving brownfield modifications can be analyzed to help verify real-world value against predicted benefit. These monitoring stations can also be used to predict problems before they occur, cutting costs and reducing maintenance needs.