Streamline Oil and Gas Production Operations Using JOYN Oil & Gas Production SaaS Solution

Overview

Oil and gas operators are looking to eliminate inefficiencies in their production operations and field services by using innovative and cost-effective technology. For example, in the oil and gas field operations, typically most operators run a fixed route every day without being able to prioritize high-volume wells or issues that need fixing due to lack of timely data. While on a route, operators spend a lot of time collecting data into multiple places including paper, spreadsheets, and other systems. Since this data is spread across multiple systems, with no central mechanism to provide real-time alerts, field operations centers often rely on phone calls and hand-delivered dispatches to pass vital information to operators. Visibility into key issues falls through the cracks, efficiency drops, and problems remain unaddressed for hours. Inefficiency and latency are also seen in corporate operations. For example, using legacy systems, the production allocation processes typically run overnight. With iterative processes of corrections and re-runs, finalizing the monthly allocations can easily take a few days.

In addition, their systems, whether hosted by customers in their own data centers or at their vendor’s data centers, typically require customers to budget and plan for expensive upgrades to newer releases. Due to other competing priorities, customers often delay these upgrades by several months (or years) until they have the resources and budget for an upgrade. As a result, they cannot take advantage of new product capabilities for months or years. This delay also forces the vendors to support multiple versions of their software at any given time, impeding their ability to pour all their engineering investments into innovation.

Seven Lakes Technologies developed JOYN Oil & Gas Production to address these issues. It addresses the inefficiencies in field operations head-on by delivering a fully integrated, truly cloud-native SaaS solution for oilfield production, field operations, and production accounting. JOYN is a single product that unifies field data capture, operations administration, production allocations, analytics, and reporting in one system and allows codeless integration with most other systems of records. Since the solution is SaaS based, customers move to new releases automatically, so precious R&D budgets can be directed towards innovation rather than maintaining old releases.

This blog post answers two questions for you – how oil and gas operators can make their operations more agile and efficient using JOYN, and how it takes advantage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology to deliver this value to the customers.

Agile and Efficient Operations Using JOYN

There are three key reasons why you should evaluate JOYN for your production operations and field services.

Efficiency and Effectiveness

The JOYN solution enables an oil and gas operator to improve the productivity of their field operations by combining innovative capabilities into a single system. For example, it enables mobile phone data entry at source, and SCADA integration, which eliminate grease books and spreadsheets. Integration with SCADA devices allows operations to collect streams of data throughout the day rather than take snapshots once or twice a day. Collection of data directly into the system ensures that all the data is in one place and accessible to everyone at the same time, facilitating collaborative problem solving. Further, the routing algorithms within JOYN use this data to optimize operator routes, enabling field operations to address high volume assets on priority and implement pumping by exception. JOYN also enables you to define your well network on the cloud, create formulas for allocation using expression builder, and use real-time data collected by mobile and SCADA devices to get your allocation totals interactively within minutes rather than hours with the older systems. These are some of the productivity improvements that operations and corporate are enjoying with JOYN.

Analytics and Insights

The JOYN solution applies sophisticated analytics on incoming data to help identify issues proactively and improve decision making, as well as streamline processes. JOYN synthesizes data from SCADA and IoT systems into its platform. To enable this, it is architected for scalability to capture and manage thousands of terabytes of data every second. It then synthesizes and harmonizes this data and applies advanced AI-based analytics to translate it into clear insights for informed action in real time. With such insights, field operations can prioritize alerts and intelligently navigate workers in the field. JOYN analytics include production analytics to optimize overall production, downtime analytics to enable you to control downtime and production loss, and state and federal regulatory reports for compliance tracking and reporting.

Access to Latest Innovation

With JOYN’s cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS solution, customers are automatically upgraded, so you no longer need to budget and plan for an expensive upgrade. This provides you immediate access to latest features in the solution. In addition, since a SaaS system auto upgrades you to next release, does not have to spread their resources supporting multiple versions of the product, while developing new features. As a result, JOYN is able to invest close to 60% of its total gross revenue on new product development – a significant increase over legacy systems.

In addition, JOYN also delivers two go-to-market innovations:

1. Pricing: JOYN Oil & Gas Production software’s pricing is based on active well count and Barrels of Oil Equivalent Per Day (BOEPD). This gives you the freedom to adjust your costs based on your production and never pay for capacity you are not using. In other words, if you make less, you pay less, resulting in savings to you. Customers can calculate their price based on wells and BOEPD on the website. The ROI calculator also helps you quickly see the significant increase in cash flow by switching to JOYN.

2. Try before you buy: JOYN Oil and Gas Production is a SaaS platform and gives you the ability to test drive the software during a 14-day free trial period. During this trial period itself you can login to the sandbox environment, load your data, run allocation, verify results, and go live – all within 14 days.

How JOYN Uses AWS Technology to Bring Innovation

JOYN Oil & Gas Production leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring a scalable cloud solution to its customers. AWS provides a highly reliable, scalable, cost-effective infrastructure platform in the cloud that enables applications providers to deliver SaaS-based applications to its customers. This section identifies the key AWS building blocks in JOYN and the benefits it brings to its customers. The following figure refers to JOYN.AI reference architecture diagram and the various AWS services it uses.

Figure: How JOYN.AI leverages the AWS building blocks

AWS Lambda allows JOYN to scale up or down automatically based on customer loads. A legacy system would have to budget for and deploy compute power based on peak customer loads, resulting in wasted expense during normal load conditions. If the workload goes beyond planned capacity, a legacy solution would have to bring the application down and add additional hardware. Use of Lambda makes JOYN very cost efficient, by allocating optimal resources during normal workload while ensuring the service can dynamically add additional resources during peak conditions and continue to run normally without any disruption to customers.

JOYN uses Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed proprietary NoSQL database service that enables it to collect fast streams of data from any number of SCADA devices, without the fear of data overflow conditions that a database in a legacy system would face. Data collected from SCADA systems in DynamoDB is then moved in JOYN into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Athena, which allows JOYN users to easily create regulatory and operational reports and dashboards. Athena makes it easy for any JOYN user with SQL skills to quickly analyze large-scale datasets and create operational visibility into their environment. JOYN also uses Amazon Aurora, a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, to manage the data within its solution. Amazon Kinesis allows JOYN to ingest IoT telemetry data for machine learning, analytics, and other applications. It enables JOYN to process and analyze data as it arrives and begin analyzing instantly instead of having to wait until all the data is collected before the processing can begin, as seen in traditional applications. JOYN also uses Amazon ElastiCache for memory caching to increase speed and responsiveness.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) makes it easy for to run JOYN as a scalable cloud service by using containers as a building block, which eliminates the need for its ops team to install, operate, and scale a cluster management infrastructure. JOYN architecture leverages the Amazon API Gateway to manage the APIs within the JOYN system and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for users’ authentication, authorization, and user management. Identity and access management are important elements of a secure JOYN.

Conclusion

JOYN Oil & Gas Production enables oil and gas operators to significantly increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations and increase their cost advantage by delivering a fully integrated, truly cloud-native SaaS solution for oilfield production, field operations and production accounting. Key innovations include mobile phone data entry at source, integration with SCADA devices along with routing algorithms that enable pumping by exception, allocation results available in minutes, operational insights, and access to new innovations without needing expensive migration planning. Native cloud capability using AWS services provide scalability and security in an efficient manner. If interested in evaluating JOYN SaaS solution, please contact us at https://joyn.ai/contact/ or visit us at JOYN.ai.

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