Don’t tell them you are using Excel for scheduling!

There is an excellent article in the Journal of Petroleum Technology, written by their Emerging Technology Senior Editor, titled, “Don’t Tell Them You Are Using Excel”. It includes a quote from Chevron’s CIO, Bill Braun, speaking at this year’s Spring SPE/IADC conference: “Excel is the new slide rule, and using Excel is a practice that does not support my company’s drive to become a digital technology leader.” He specifically pointed out that the painstaking process of creating detailed drilling plans  simply can’t be done in Excel: “It’s been great, but let’s see it in the rearview mirror and move on. There are so many better tools coming out.”

We at Actenum see this all the time with operators we visit, who are looking for a better, more technologically advanced way to schedule well delivery operations. With advanced tools like Actenum’s DSO, AI is used to automatically build and optimize complex drilling program schedules at speeds, and with a level of reliability, that are simply unattainable with a manual spreadsheet. In today’s environment, operators need software to accelerate decision making as they plan for recovery and decide how to adjust plans to rapidly changing market conditions. And they need to have visibility into how changes to the schedule impact cost, production, and other important metrics.

We loved the quote from John DeWardt, a drilling operations consultant known for his role in creating the Drilling Systems Automation Road Map, “Using Excel to do scheduling is like running the Daytona 500 in a Ford Focus.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves!

If you’d like to see how Actenum’s advanced scheduling software can help with your digital transformation, please contact us at info@actenum.com.