Overcoming 5 Common Oil & Gas Production Software Migration Challenges

The fears oil and gas industry leaders have around production data management and hydrocarbon accounting software migrations are understandable: Which product will best suit our particular needs? How much customisation will be needed? What if the project takes too long or costs too much? What if, in the end, our needs are still not met? But companies across industries are not letting anxieties hold them back from cloud benefits like scalability, lowered costs and innovation.  

In fact, analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 50% of enterprises will have started using an industry cloud platform to accelerate their business initiatives. This isn’t about simply shifting legacy systems to a cloud data centre; this is about how you take advantage of the many benefits of adopting true, multi-tenant cloud platforms and still achieve success. The oil and gas industry doesn’t have to miss out on these business benefits.  

You can overcome these five common oil and gas production software migration challenges by taking an agile approach to planning and execution, selecting a low-code solution and partnering with industry experts.  

Overcoming challenge 1: How to define what you need 

Your migration is an opportunity to break free of your legacy system’s  constraints, and massively improve your business processes. But, too often, organisations start the whole migration project by developing a complex and highly detailed requirements specification.  Inevitably, this reflects what they know, from years of experience with their existing system, rather than what they dream of. It attempts to ensure success by incorporating every possible detail and, as a consequence, overly constrains the possible solutions.  

 Clearly,  it is necessary to describe what the system must achieve. But you should focus on what you need to do, not how you need to do it.  

You could also consider taking an agile approach to the whole implementation project, and start by thinking about your desired outcomes for one user story, implement the migration for this use case and iterate. Next, scale your learnings to a second user story and repeat. Low code platforms support this particularly well, since it is easy to re-work, extend, or modify your initial implementation.  

Overcoming challenge 2: The lack of visibility into technical processes 

Your legacy system is likely a black box where you have little insight into calculations and extensions, and changes require engineering resources.  

By selecting a low-code cloud platform like the EnergySys Cloud Platform, hosted on AWS, newfound transparency places your business team in the driver’s seat, and they control the migration schedule.  

Now, non-engineers can confidently migrate use case by use case. Using their own formulae and calculations, users ensure accuracy and make incremental changes on their own, fuelling your agile approach.  

Overcoming challenge 3: Building in flexibility to meet tomorrow’s needs 

Traditionally, oil and gas production software systems required costly and cumbersome customisations whenever your team faced a merger and acquisition, a request for a new report or an update to a calculation. 

However, now that your business users are steering your platform, you can navigate as business conditions dictate.  

With EnergySys, for example, users with insight into business needs are able to adapt workflows without coding, easily supporting new assets, evolving regulations or even new business ventures. 

Furthermore, your team can pivot and adapt to dynamic oil and gas market conditions by extending your platform’s capabilities through secure but powerful third-party software integrations. 

Overcoming challenge 4: The data migration headache 

The fear of being caught in the spiderweb of historical data has derailed many projects before they even began. And data migration is indeed more complicated if the data structure of the source system is unknown or the data is difficult to access.  

But selecting a target cloud platform that offers data integration tools will ease the pain.  

Moreover, you can address your concerns by partnering with an expert experienced in mapping data from legacy systems like yours to cloud platforms. Not only does this streamline the process, it also provides you with the confidence that your data is in safe hands. 

Overcoming challenge 5: Finding the resources for a migration project 

While a low-code platform does put you in control of your migration’s pacing and timeline, it still may be a commitment you’re not ready to shoulder alone.  

While many of EnergySys’ customers manage their migrations independently, those looking to migrate as quickly as possible work with partners.  

With front-row seats to many different migration projects, partners are uniquely positioned to provide valuable insights into pitfalls to avoid, as well as best practices.  

Partners can provide template applications crucial to efficiently running operations, including production accounting, cargo dispatching, pipeline transportation, partner-operated assets and other aspects of the business. 

Plus, they can help you make intelligent process improvements for innovation today, and better prepare you for future challenges.  

How to start your successful migration 

As you follow these planning and execution steps, you’ll start unlocking the benefits of your new cloud platform, including control, flexibility, new capabilities and lowered total cost of ownership. Learning more about the production management cloud platform solution that holds data for over 56% of the North Sea Hydrocarbons and almost 70% of Australian production – EnergySys – is a great way to start tapping into these benefits.  

You can see the EnergySys solution brief or read how other oil and gas companies have successfully migrated.