Ramp Up Efficiency in Drilling and Completions Operations
An interview with Pioneer Natural Resources
Pioneer Natural Resources (PNR), an operating company with assets in the Permian, is constantly striving to find new ways to drive efficiency in its operations and capital management.
Automatic field ticket approvals are one way the company saves significant time with field operations. By integrating Enverus OpenTicket with WellView morning reports, PNR’s drilling engineers focus only on tickets that do not match morning report data.
In this interview with Brandy Obennoskey, senior lead accountant at PNR, we discuss how Enverus has helped PNR save time and improve cost management.
Enverus: How does Pioneer Resources automate ticket approval using WellView morning reports?
Brandy Obennoskey: There are two ways to do it. First, you can import data from OpenTicket, our digital field ticketing platform, into Peloton’s WellView application. This is a straightforward export of data generated by a supplier that’s entered into the cost estimate section of the WellView morning report. This works well if the supplier entered the information on the same day and time that the work is done. For a majority of suppliers, there’s a lag. You can also use the morning report information to automatically approve the field ticket. This is how we do it. The field supervisor enters the cost estimation in the morning report and sends it to the office as part of the daily operation’s routine. The information is then exported into OpenTicket. You can automatically approve that field ticket if the ticket matches the morning report.
Enverus: How did Pioneer shorten approval times and reduce manual approvals by pushing the WellView data to OpenTicket?
BO: Our suppliers were being asked to submit tickets into OpenTicket faster. Their feedback to us was they were still seeing a lag in approvals. So, we looked at what we could do to assist our approvers. We realized approvers were manually validating the data from WellView, pulling up OpenTicket and eyeballing it to make sure the data matches before approving it. That’s what led us to this integration. In Q2 2021, we took a daily report from WellView and started matching it up manually against our OpenTicket data with the intention to help our approvers quickly identify which exceptions they needed to review. As soon as we turned on auto-approval, we were able to match 80% of tickets, driving our average approval time from 15 to below four days.
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Enverus: How did Pioneer roll the automation out?
BO: In the first few months, we did a manual gut check on the automation with a subset of WellView data. We chose data from our drilling site and pushed the data daily from WellView into OpenTicket. Our approvers could go in, filter everything that matched and easily approve those first. In April and May, we turned on the automatic approval process. It was a simple flip of a switch. All you have to do is go in and say everything that matches 100% is auto-approved. We saw a drastic improvement in our drilling invoice approval time. Our average time went from 15 days down to below four days. About 12% of the volume became automated instantly.
Enverus: How has the integration of WellView and OpenTicket helped Pioneer better manage budget costs?
BO: We now get insight into the data in real-time. Before, this data analysis happened within a three- or six-month timeframe. Getting a feel for that data has been a tremendous help to us as far as getting accurate budget information.
Enverus: Did you set dollar parameters for the invoices that could be automatically approved?
BO: We focused on the low-cost invoices. Some of our approvers handle anywhere from 500 to 600 approvals at a time. That’s a heavy load on them, especially when we know the data is already in our morning report system. So, we gave them this option — if it’s entered into WellView correctly, it’s timely and it matches, then there’s no need for manual approval. This removes that duplicate process.