How to Gain Efficiencies and Grow with Document Digitization

When independent oil and gas operator, Cantium, engaged Ripcord, it had recently acquired two of the largest oil fields to ever undergo development off the Gulf of Mexico. Along with the underwater acreage, the company also inherited mountains of paperwork, some of it dating as far back as the Cold War years. 

Cantium was established to create operational efficiency, leanness, and agility at the Bay Marchand and Main Pass shallow-water fields. It wasn't about to let piles of yellowing files and documents slow it down, but it also wasn't going to lose the potentially valuable data that lay therein by simply allowing the documentation to sit untouched, gathering more dust.

Ripcord stepped in to solve the problem by leveraging our proprietary vision-guided robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technology. 

Thousands of Banker's Boxes, Oh My!

The two oil fields, situated on the Gulf of Mexico’s Outer Continental Shelf and in Louisiana state waters, were first discovered in 1949 and between 1956 and 1962. Cantium 2017 purchase came with the large number of aging documents one might expect from such established producers. Papers included well logs, operations reports, and other in-depth supporting documentation. In addition to being voluminous, a great deal of it was fragile, so when it came to the survival of the data on the pages, the fewer human hands that touched it, the better.

Working with Cantium and its partner, oil and gas digital transformation company Energective, Ripcord devised an integrated digital solution that would scan, pull in data from the old files, and make every single piece of information contained in the thousands of banker's boxes it had received in the acquisition searchable, sortable, and digitally storable.

"The Geological Data Doesn't Change"

Given the nature of the oil and gas business, letting the old files and their data go unexamined would have been tantamount to a physician refusing to review the health history of a new patient. "The geological data doesn't change," said Energective CEO, Bob Lockwood. This made the data incredibly valuable to the team. "Being able to rapidly ingest all of that data and make it available to the asset groups to understand how a lot of those assets started being developed back in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s cannot be overstated," Lockwood added.

"The employee-brainpower cost — in both time and money — of sifting through all that paper would have made the project unfeasible. Having Ripcord's solutions extract the data accelerated the timeframe, and the time is worth way more than the cost issue for most of these oil companies," Lockwood said.

2X the Output and Greater Accuracy

In addition to culling data from the old files in a fraction of the time it would take someone to manually extract the information, Ripcord's digital solution boosted the organization's profit margins significantly. Because Ripcord's fully digital solution removed the risk of any human error occurring, the accuracy of the information that was pulled increased enormously. Based on an analysis of the content digitized by Ripcord, the output of the two purchased oil fields doubled for Cantium.

As Lockwood said, the solution Ripcord created for Cantium "is something different."

To learn more about this unique robotic process automation solution, download the Cantium Case Study. Or, if you're ready to learn how Ripcord can help your organization become more efficient, get in touch with our team today.