Critical Concerns of Oil & Gas Companies

The current state of the Oil & Gas industry is a complex multitude of changes from technology innovations, economic shifts, and growing competition. Headlines sprawled across respected news outlets and research institutes alike scream phrases like “Prosperity Postponed”, “Slow Path to Recovery”, and “6 of the 8 top oil-pumping states hit recession“, leaving an abundance of questions surrounding the industry’s financial complexities and future business trends. As industry leaders are quickly discovering, this new landscape requires a diversity of thinking, a higher risk tolerance, and an investment in “high probability of failure” projects in place of the traditionally dominating “safe bet” projects. These new and seismic expectations cannot be met without adequate technology supporting them and supplying intricate roadmaps for digitization. Building on this background, Eventful Conference’s has developed the agenda for the 2017 Best Practices for Oil and Gas Conference – centered around the leadership, technology, ideas and innovations that are metamorphosing the Oil and Gas industry.

While creating the format for 2017’s conference and to better understand today’s shifting industry, Eventful Conferences completed a Research Report by working with oil and gas professionals from over 50 key organizations. These industry experts from America and across the globe supplied this list of top critical areas of focus:

1. Organizational Culture & Change Management: Managing the transformational change organizations are experiencing along the 3 continuums of people, process, and technology.

2. Data Visibility for Agility: As analytics are now appearing in earnings releases for investor prospectuses, data is not only necessary for internal agility, but also as a differentiating factor for investments.

3. Maintaining Efficiencies as Operations Scale Up & Continuing to Identify Cost Reduction: Maintaining all the efficiencies that were achieved in the downturn and continuing to identify and reduce inefficiencies to support prosperity in “new normal conditions”.

4. Master Data Management & Governance: The basis for predictive analytics and the pathway to digitalization all rely on master data – structure, management, and governance.

5. Sweating your Existing Technology Investment: Organizations want to better understand what they already own, how to unlock hidden value within their technology and how get the most out of what they already have, while they ready themselves for digital transformation.

6. The Roadmap for Digitization: What does the roadmap to this key competitive advantage look like in respect to the Cloud, in-memory computing, the “Internet of Things”, IT/OT Convergence, the networked economy and the Industry 4.0 landscape?

7. Operational Integrity & Asset Effectiveness: Developing strategies that manage not only asset data but the related, connected business networks that will both enhance productivity and reduce maintenance costs.

8. Well Economics & Drilling Efficiency: Businesses are seeking deep analytical insights about well profitability, including spend analytics and production forecasting.

9. The Hydrocarbon Supply Chain: The need to drive strategic and timely decision making in trading, as well as mechanisms for retailers to maximize their customer base and increase spends per customer.

10. Procurement: Finding solutions to enable transparency across vendor networks and enabling tools to ensure they’re procuring products and components of high quality at the lowest prices possible.

11. Cyber and Physical Security: It’s no longer just about protecting information, data and intellectual property – it’s also about protecting physical assets and infrastructure from real-world and virtual threats.

12. Safe Operations, EH&S and Regulatory Compliance: Assessing risk across the organization, maximizing the EH&S of operations and ensuring regulatory compliance to reduce any possibility of environmental or workforce catastrophe that would deteriorate shareholder value.

13. Capital Project Efficiency: The most successful organizations are those that have married the business strategy with a capital projects program that can be impeccably – and immediately executed.

Each one of these topics of concern has or will affect a company within the gas and oil industry—positively or negatively. The overlapping and layering of these issues has infiltrated business models completely unprepared for change. Staying in the know, ahead of the competition, fully educated on evolving trends, and expecting the unexpected are just a few of the new demands success in this landscape now requires. Keep your team connected and involved by attending Best Practices for Oil & Gas designed for all industry segments including upstream, midstream, downstream and oilfield services.