Production planning software: what oil and gas operators should look for
Every operator has a production plan. The question is what happens to it after January.
In plenty of businesses, the answer is: not much. The plan was built over weeks, in spreadsheets, from decline curves, uptime assumptions, and maintenance schedules. It was signed off, distributed, and then the field started disagreeing with it. A workover slipped. A well surprised everyone. By spring, the plan describes an operation that no longer exists, and re-planning is so painful that nobody quite does it. The plan becomes a thing you explain variances against, rather than a thing you steer by.
Production planning software exists to fix that. But the label covers everything from reservoir simulation suites to glorified spreadsheets, so here’s what to actually look for.
First, what the software should cover
At its core, production planning software turns your assumptions into expected volumes. Decline profiles by well. Planned and unplanned downtime. Maintenance and workover schedules. Constraints from facilities, pipelines, and contracts. Out the other end come the forecasts your business runs on: field and asset profiles, budget inputs, partner commitments, and the targets your daily operation is measured against.
Some tools focus on the subsurface end of this, and some on the commercial end. Most operators need the middle: a place where engineering assumptions become business numbers, and where those numbers stay honest as the year unfolds. That’s the gap this piece is about.
What to look for
1. The plan lives with the actuals
This is the single biggest discriminator. A plan that lives in its own tool, away from the production data, has to be manually compared against reality, and manual comparison is why variance work takes days instead of minutes. When plan and actuals sit on the same platform, variance analysis stops being a monthly excavation and becomes a daily glance. The plan stays alive because checking it costs nothing.
2. Your planners own the assumptions
Forecast logic is opinion, encoded. The decline rate you apply, the uptime you assume, the way you phase a drilling campaign: these judgements belong to your reservoir and production engineers, and they should be able to see and change them directly. If the assumptions are buried in a vendor’s model, your plan reflects their opinions, not yours. Look for software where the logic is visible and workable by your own team, ideally in a form they already think in.
3. Reforecasting is routine, not a project
The test question for any demo: “We’ve just lost a well for six weeks, show me tomorrow’s version of the annual plan.” If the answer involves days of rework, the software will train your team not to reforecast, and the plan will quietly die each spring, exactly as it does now. Good production forecasting software makes a reforecast an afternoon’s work, so the plan can absorb reality as fast as reality arrives.
4. Scenarios without rebuilds
Planning is comparative by nature. What if the shutdown moves? What if we accelerate the infill programme? What if gas prices make that field worth choking back? You should be able to copy a plan, change the assumptions, and compare outcomes side by side, without rebuilding anything. For genuinely complex scheduling problems, the same foundations stretch a long way: we’ve written about using Monte Carlo simulation for LNG vessel scheduling as one example of what planners can build when the platform doesn’t box them in.
5. Granularity that matches your operation
A monthly, field-level plan can’t explain a daily, well-level problem. The software should hold the plan at the resolution your operation actually manages, wells and days where it matters, and roll it up cleanly to the views your partners, regulators, and board expect. If the tool forces one granularity everywhere, someone ends up maintaining a shadow spreadsheet to bridge the gap, and the shadow spreadsheet always wins.
6. The plan feeds the business without retyping
Forecasts drive budgets, partner statements, nomination commitments, and emissions projections. Every re-key between the planning tool and those consumers is a chance for the numbers to drift apart. Look for a platform where the plan is a source other processes draw on directly, not a document that gets transcribed.
The pattern behind the six
You’ll have noticed these criteria share a shape. They all favour software where your own experts hold the logic, the data, and the pace of change, rather than a fixed tool that holds your planning hostage to its design. That’s the thinking behind our planning and forecasting solutions: plans your domain experts configure, on the same platform as the production data those plans answer to.
It stretches to the sharp end of planning, too. When NWSOLC needed LNG cargo scheduling alongside domestic gas commitments, the same configurable foundations handled a scheduling problem most fixed tools would call an edge case.
Try it against last year’s plan
Here’s a fair test for any planning software, ours included. Take last year’s plan and this year’s actuals, and ask how the tool would have handled the gap: how quickly the variances would have surfaced, how easily the plan would have absorbed them, and who would have made the changes. Book a call, and we’ll match you with a partner who knows your domain and can run that test with you, on your own numbers.
