Client Profile.
The company is a leading energy-dedicated Software as a service and data analytics company offering energy exploration decision support across the energy industry including oil and gas, financial institutions, power, utilities, and renewables. From early-stage investment to full-scale development, they provide intelligence and analytical insights to 6,000 customers in over 50 countries.
Business Need.
The client had hundreds of thousands of oil & gas drill stem test results in the form of scanned images called “scout cards”. They leveraged the information contained in the images to extract business intelligence for marketing to a global clientele in the oil and gas space. The scout card data typically includes information about location, total depth, logs run, production status, productive capacity, pressure, permeability or extent of an oil or gas reservoir.
The company needed to process a huge volume of two hundred thousand scanned documents. This required transferring hundreds of data fields from the documents to the client’s online database called “Refinery Tool” through a manual data entry process.
They approached HitechDigital to take on the task of scout card data extraction and entry.
Challenges.
An as-is and scope assessment of the project threw up various challenges for the data conversion team. The greatest challenge was familiarizing the teams with specific and complex terminology associated with the oil and gas industry, including abbreviations of the terminologies. Specific challenges that the team successfully navigated were:
- Hiring and training resources on domain specific oil and gas industry terminology such as well testing, surface and reservoir pressure, drill pipe, porosity, pressure increase, wellbore, etc.
- Setting up a 60-member high skilled data processing team within 3 months.
- Scaling up volumes from an initial set of 1,000 cards per week to 12,600 cards per week, given the huge scope of work which at times went to about 600 keying fields per scout card.
- Several scanned scout cards were dated, going back to many years, and hence illegible and required extra comprehension efforts.
- The information on scout cards was unstructured, depending on county/state which reduced the speed of processing.
- Meeting a 90% accuracy benchmark for the complex data and volume-heavy scout card data entry project; smallest errors such as radius of investigation or permeability could affect the efficiency of drilling process.
- The heavy data files to be entered in the online client portal would often affect server speed and adversely impact productivity.
Solution.
The data specialists at HitechDigital digitized hundreds and thousands of data fields across 700,000 scanned scout cards containing oil & gas drill stem-test results. The high volumes and accuracy of the complex data conversion, achieved through meticulous hiring, training and quality-checks, helped client offer high value business intelligence across metrics to clients.
Approach.
To address the scalability and complexity needs of the project, a structured workflow was setup.
Hiring and Training
- Screened and hired an initial team of 10 data entry specialists with good comprehension skills; the team was augmented (ramped up) by 10 additional members week on week till it reached the desired 60-member strength.
- Trained the team members on relevant domain knowledge including terminology and abbreviations related to oil and gas industry.
Data conversion
- The team worked on two sets of documents in the client’s “Refinery tool” – scanned scout cards and a database for data population.
- The data entry specialist identified relevant information in the scout card and manually entered the data into the online database, taking care to enter in relevant fields.
- Fields which needed particular attention were tagged as “R” in orange color in the scout cards and the operators were required to address them accordingly.
Quality Check and Audit
- A six-member quality check team was assigned to validate the data entered against original scanned data as well as conformity to the designated fields.
- Erroneous entries were tagged as Open and routed back to the responsible operator for making necessary corrections.
- The sample size set aside for quality checks was 20% of volume from each batch of scout cards.
Software & Technology
- Client’s online database through remote desktop login credentials
Business Impact.
700,000 scanned scout cards digitized in 12 months.
90% accuracy achieved for data entry of complex drill test data.
58% savings on workforce cost achieved through outsourcing model.
