Reducing from 35,000 to 7,000 records: Rationalising & Digitising

Hero Stats

• Further significant savings were then achieved when the legacy documents were securely destroyed
• Rationalised to 7,000, with 3,500 indexed and stored + 3,500 digitised
• Further significant savings were then achieved when the legacy documents were securely destroyed

Context

When decommissioning oil or other energy assets, retaining the valuable data and information that has been gained during the lifetime of the site, is important – to ensure that anything learnt or secured during the exploration of the site, can be retained for use by future generations. However, this data is costly to store, hard to access, and held in formats that are difficult to use, and harder still to share across teams.

Challenge

A leading energy company, whilst decommissioning several sites in the North Sea, wanted an end-of-life information management system that could turn physical assets into digital information – knowing it could be invaluable to future energy thinking and innovation.

With more than 2,500 boxes with upwards of 35,000 individual items stored within, the client required a solution that could include both digital and physical data – and create a cost effective, yet robust information management system.

Solution

Part of the challenge was identifying high value data, such as oil well logs dating back to the 1970s, from the vast array of data that was being stored – much of which was no longer of any use.

Oasis retrieved and reviewed all 35,000 pieces of information – from paper records to rock and soil samples and identified that 28,000 were obsolete – and no longer required for either future use, or for regulatory reasons. These could be destroyed.

The remaining items were identified as high value and needed to be digitised. Oasis provided a bespoke digital scanning service, as a good deal of the data was in a non-standard format and required specialist treatment. These items were then bar code indexed, and that meta data uploaded into a cloud-based data management platform. The client could now access this information digitally – with significant improvements in the ease and efficiency of retrieving data.

In addition, they were also able to submit these digital records to the UK National Data Repository, fulfilling their regulatory obligation to do so, but also preserving this information for future energy transition activities.

Outcome

The project resulted in the client being able to radically improve the way it managed it data, as well as reducing the costs of storing vast amounts of information that were no longer of any use. It has also meant that the client is now able to implement a long-term retention strategy for all physicals assets, removing the need to conduct such a large-scale operation in future.