A target country or region announces it will grant new oil and gas licenses for onshore or offshore exploration. In an ideal world, responding is a simple proposition. You evaluate the technical data package, define your strategy, assemble your bid, submit your application, and secure that new opportunity.
Unfortunately, creating your application always demands more time than you think and requires more coordination than you anticipate.
If inconsistent technical data, regulatory requirements, and expert bottlenecks have you at your breaking point, stick with us. Here our experts reveal proven strategies for getting your process on track. Strategies that are the standard across the Norwegian shelf, and best practices across Mexico, United Kingdom, Greenland, Iceland, and Denmark.
Confronting the Challenges
When it comes to licensing round bids, there are a lot of moving parts to manage. There are scientists, engineers, and other specialists to coordinate. There is vast amounts of complex technical data from various sources to gather and integrate. So, you established a process to avoid the missteps and detours that can easily cause delays and derail your efforts. Over time, however, disconnects and simple mistakes have naturally creeped into your process.
For example, the geologists complete their analysis and hand off their reports to the engineers. The engineers use this information to develop their designs. However, they encounter inconsistent or missing data. The back-and-forth begins, creating delays that can disrupt the project timeline.
This is the state of a serial application process; one task at a time, and it’s significantly impacting your application development goals:
- Inconsistent Information: Silos between discipline teams cause inconsistencies in data and assumptions, leading to conflicting information and errors.
- Increased Rework: Inaccurate or incomplete information leads to significant rework, such as redesigning equipment, which can increase project costs.
- Delayed Feedback Loops: Information flows in a linear fashion, leading to back-and-forth emails and problems that are not identified until later in the process.
- Document Control Issues: Different experts or teams work with different versions of the same document, leading to confusion and errors, and difficulty tracking changes.
- Manual Coordination: Manual coordination takes time. So does manual compilation and integration of data. Both lead to bottlenecks and delays.
- Missed Deadlines: Delays in communication or misunderstandings cause bottlenecks that delay internal reviews, impacting the project timeline.
Breaking Down the Barriers
In the competitive oil and gas industry, securing licenses for exploration and production is paramount to success. However, the process of preparing a winning application is complex and fraught with challenges. Traditional approaches, characterized by a serial process and siloed teams, often leads to errors, delays, and increased costs.
By breaking down these silos and embracing a collaborative approach, you can reclaim significant time and dramatically enhance application accuracy and quality.
- Increase Efficiency: Streamline process, optimize resources, reduce rework, and minimize errors for faster project timelines and reduced costs.
- Reduce Errors: Minimize the risk of human error, address inconsistencies earlier in the process, and ensure data consistency across the entire application.
- Improve Collaboration: Minimize misunderstandings and facilitate faster decision-making and problem-solving for more comprehensive applications.
- Enhance Quality: Achieve more insightful content for greater confidence in reservoir analysis and engineering design, and greater evaluation readability.
- Accelerate Development: Reduce application processing times for faster project approvals, quicker entry into production, and faster payback on investment.
The Competitive Advantage
Oil and gas companies that can efficiently and quickly obtain licenses gain a competitive advantage in the industry. They improve their financial performance, enhance their market position, and achieve greater success in their exploration and production activities.
How can you accelerate your application development process without sacrificing accuracy and quality? Start leveraging your time and resources instead of consuming them on logistics.
Here’s how:
- Streamline Workflow: Centralize writing, work in-parallel, automate workflow, eliminate the back-and-forth emails, and avoid lost conversations and details.
- Automate Tasks: Eliminate manual coordination, automate data compilation and integration, as well as layout, formatting and application production, and avoid repetitious, time-consuming work.
- Collaborate Real-Time: See each other’s work, eliminate errors and inconsistencies, provide continuous inputs for rapid improvements, and avoid costly changes and delays.
- Improve Document Control: Control document and section access, ensure everyone is working in the current version, track and compare all changes for auditing or rollback, and avoid time-consuming conflicts and rework.
- Content Access: Stop searching through past applications for content. Standardize relevant content for ease of reuse and tailoring, foster more consistent content use, and reclaim time for focusing on complex requirements.
- Project Templates: Quickly establish the workspace and application document structure, as well as pre-defined location and project specific regulations and assumptions and language to drive compliance.
- Increase Transparency: Keep your finger on the pulse of task and content progress and status, and know when to step in to avoid bottlenecks or reallocate resources.
- Enterprise Security: Grant and restrict document and section access and permissions, protecting confidential and proprietary data and intellectual property while ensuring only authorized individuals have access to make changes.
Overcome Licensing Application Challenges Effortlessly with XaitPorter
Oil and gas licensing boosts a country’s economy, and governments work diligently to attract you as an investor. Responding to their invitation is complicated, and anything that slows you down impacts your ability to win and grow.
For over two decades now, Xait has been the standard licensing round application solution provider for Norway, with success in a range of other production license application rounds in Mexico, United Kingdom, Greenland, Iceland and Denmark. In fact, 100% of the APA 2022 operator licenses went to Xait clients.
Here’s how XaitPorter helps our oil and gas clients develop licensing applications, proposals, documents, and reports 70% faster:
- Increase Efficiency: “Our mid-year ROI review confirmed we had achieved our goals by cutting time spent on proposals in half. This allowed us to respond to 65% more bids with the same level of resources.” Christina Brickner, Director of Proposals and Business Development Systems, at Franklin Energy
- Reduce Errors: “The people haven’t changed, and the content hasn’t changed, but the consistency, productivity and focus has. That is why we have such great success with XaitPorter." Espen Gilbu, Sales and Marketing Manager at IKM Ocean Design
- Improve Collaboration: "It was very quickly clear that XaitPorter provided significant benefits from Microsoft Word, including automated formatting, multi-user collaboration, a powerful content library and a cross-business proposal format." Ian Clarke, Hydroprocessing Product Marketing Manager at Honeywell UOP
- Enhance Quality: “XaitPorter provided significant benefits as our teams could primarily focus on the content and work simultaneously across the different sections of each PDO.” Henrik Meinich-Bache, Office Administrator, Aker BP
- Accelerate Development: “We get more done with fewer people in less time. This frees up capacity for more value-adding tasks than battling with formatting or emailing new document versions.” Anders Skogseth-Braathen, Global Business Development Manager in Cegal
The oil and gas industry operates in a very dynamic and competitive environment. Companies that continue to rely on traditional, manual methods for developing licensing applications will face significant disadvantages, such as delayed projects, increased costs, and missed opportunities,
By embracing modern technologies and best practices, you can avoid these pitfalls and gain a significant competitive advantage in the industry.