Category: RPA Oil

RPA Can Help Oil & Gas Weather Industry Volatility


  • RPA Can Help Oil & Gas Weather
    Industry Volatility

We live in a world of uncertainty, a world in which COVID-19 continues to rage around us, disagreements between OPEC countries in early 2020 caused tension in the industry, and the world economy continues to suffer. This has resulted in unstable crude oil prices. In in the early months of 2020, the price of crude oil fell drastically. While these prices have rebounded, uncertainty still hovers like a spectre above the Oil & Gas industry.

Oil & Gas companies are working hard to navigate this unprecedented time in history, looking for ways to cut expenses as energy prices remain unstable. Cutting back on development, deferring projects to a future date, and focusing on regions that offer high tax incentives are all traditional tactics that help stem losses.

However, there is another solution that the Oil & Gas industry has previously been slow to adopt, yet can result in significant cost savings and increased productivity. It is the adoption of robotic process automation (RPA), which makes it possible for Oil & Gas companies to streamline processes and operations like never before.

What Is RPA?

RPA is an automation technology that uses intelligent software-based robots or “bots” to intelligently perform tasks that are important, yet repetitive and time-consuming. The result is that processes can be completed more quickly, while eliminating human error. This, in turn, results in increased productivity, lower costs, and the ability to free up employee time to complete high-value tasks.

How RPA Can Help

RPA can benefit upstream, midstream, and downstream Oil & Gas operations, improving and simplifying processes and so much more. From enhancing exploration and production with the use of powerful data analytics to monitoring field infrastructure and equipment to automating all aspects of shipping logistics, RPA can save thousands of human work hours. This leaves your employees with the time to analyze the data and make decisions that can mean the difference between just getting by and thriving. Here are some examples of how RPA can make a significant difference:

Enhanced Exploration

The interpretation of seismic data is critical when it comes to discovering potential drill sites. RPA algorithms can be set up to take raw seismic data, migrate and organize it and conduct a visual interpretation of that data, something that takes hours to do manually.

In addition, when exploratory wells are drilled and core samples are taken, the data from the samples can be fed into an RPA algorithm that can identify the presence of microfossils that are indicative of favorable geological layers for the presence of oil. In addition, the algorithm can analyze the porosity of the rock and estimate the amount of oil recovery that can be expected from cross-sectional images of the core samples.

Pipeline Monitoring

A great example can be seen with pipelines, which have become an increasingly important part of the transportation of oil and gas over long distances. RPA can be used to monitor and maintain thousands of kilometers of pipelines safely and accurately.

The data and reports that are sent in from field workers would take hours to go through manually. However, RPA can search through massive amounts of data within seconds, pulling meaningful insights from it that you then have time to review and analyze, so you can provide the best possible feedback to your field operators.

Optimization of Oilfield Services

Thanks to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), sensors can be placed on all types of equipment, from service trucks to wells to chemical additive totes. RPA can then be programmed to analyze the data that comes in from these sensors, allowing intelligent cross-referencing of the chemicals, equipment and transport required in the field to the control of inventory and transportation management. In addition, RPA can be programmed to access data related to past safety incidents to determine systemic root causes so they can be addressed, improving overall safety in the field.

Predictive Maintenance

RPA can be programmed to take the unstructured data from operator logs and cross-reference that with the design specifications of the equipment, historical operational data, and records related to inspections and repair. The analysis of this data over time will allow the software to create a maintenance schedule for all equipment and automatically create and send out work orders for maintenance tasks as they are needed. This will prevent equipment downtime and ensure the equipment continues in good operation for its expected operational lifetime.

How to Get Onboard with RPA

Adopting RPA to automate processes and improve data management is a critical part of decreasing costs, increasing productivity and improving your bottom line. This means that RPA adoption is also a critical aspect of weathering the price fluctuations in crude oil as we ride out this COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

However, the adoption of RPA has to be approached in the right way. It is vital that you assess your business and operational objectives and determine which processes should be automated first to provide you with the greatest advantage. One of the best things about RPA technology is that it can be customized to suit your unique circumstances and can be scaled to meet the changing needs of your company and the industry in which you operate.

To find out more about what RPA can do for your Oil & Gas company and how we can help, reach out to Tangentia’s automation team today.

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Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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RPA and Bots Helping Organizations Maintain Operations and Protect Employees

  • RPA & Bots Helping Organizations Maintain Operations & Protect Employees

With the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic that is spreading rapidly throughout an increasing number of countries, the impact to the economy is already being felt. The stock markets are in turmoil and the OECD reports that the global economy is at risk of dropping 2.4% in 2020. Yet, we are also seeing an unprecedented response from governments, companies and other organizations around the world.

As companies strive to protect employees, technology is playing an increasingly important role in the workplace. In particular, we are seeing the benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and bots in helping to protect employees and the general public in innovative ways.

The Role of RPA in Protecting Company Employees

Employee health is a major concern for companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. With weeks, possibly even months, of disruptions to normal work routines and many employees now working from home, many governments are requiring companies to track the health of their employees.

This requires taking each employee’s temperature, checking their travel history and having them fill out a short health survey each morning when they arrive at work.

This is a lot of data to go through on a daily basis, particularly for medium- and large-sized companies. To take current employees away from their regular work or hire new employees to go through this data is a massive drain on resources.

Fortunately, RPA is invaluable when it comes to the collection, organization and analysis of this data. The way RPA works is simple and can benefit localized companies and companies that have offices and teams spread around the globe.

RPA can automate the delivery and collection of the daily health questionnaire for each employee, track which employees have filled out the survey, send reminders to those who haven’t and analyze this information along with the daily temperature readings for each employee.

RPA can quickly and easily collect and analyze the data and organize it into daily reports that are delivered to all levels of management. This saves companies a lot of human hours that would be wasted on the tedious nature of sifting through employee health data and eliminate potential human error during data analysis.

The Role of RPA and Bots in Healthcare

With COVID-19 putting an increasing amount of stress on an already stressed healthcare system, human resources are going to be stretched thinner than ever. Fortunately, there is plenty of room for the automation of routine tasks in healthcare, which can help take the burden off staff during the COVID-19 outbreak and beyond.
Here are some important tasks that can be fully automated to ensure healthcare staff can focus on what really matters – the patients:

  • Electronic bots will make it possible to streamline online scheduling by taking all the relevant information, compiling it into a report and forwarding it to the person responsible for making the appointment.
  • RPA will improve the care cycle of all patients by organizing and analyzing all the relevant patient data to increase the chances of an accurate diagnosis. In all situations, including a COVID-19 scenario, this gives doctors more time to provide human care to their patients.
  • RPA can streamline healthcare workflows, which means better management and coordination of individual cases and the overall care provided to patients. It also means an improved ability to provide remote monitoring of a patient, something that is of critical importance with so many COVID-19 patients in self-quarantine.
  • RPA makes claims management easier for the healthcare provider by making is easier to input, process and evaluate the data and deal with any appeals that are made.

All of this automation reduces the occurrence of human error, while providing a personalized user experience for patients and increasing employee satisfaction in the workplace.

The Reality

The COVID-19 situation is changing daily and the long-term effects on how we live and work are uncertain in these early days. However, technology has been developed to the point at which it can provide tools to front line workers that will vastly improve our response to this novel infectious disease. This will ultimately help keep employees, as well as customers and the general public, safe in a variety of workplace settings.

Get Started Today

Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
Read Now