PPDM: The Business Driven Standard For the Petroleum Industry
Authors: Boykiw A. 
Published: March 2010

Introduction

Petroleum companies are not in the business of data management or system development, yet they continue to spend enormous sums of money in the eternal challenge of achieving competitive advantage this way. Competitive advantage, however, is realized through better decisions and measured by company performance. What significant decisions have companies made in the past six months (or have not made); which ones were good or bad; and what information could have precluded the results?

How much are decisions being impacted today by a lack of timely quality data and what is that data? Is it a significant challenge to manage one's own data without thinking about competitive and predictive information? Perhaps the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle is often forgotten in managing fundamental, technical data. Companies should be spending their time and money on the data they don't have. The management of data that companies do own would not be an issue if appropriate standards and diligence were applied.

Standards play an important role in assuring consistent data quality for use in analytical and decision making processes. Integrating technical data is extremely time consuming when practiced on a project by project basis. This is even more challenging when data has to be copied between many disparate applications. Data for projects is used, then "lost" after first being meticulously analyzed and "cleansed" by technical professionals. There are numerous instances in the industry of seismic data being purchased several times over by companies who are not aware of their asset.

There is a movement to solve this problem through implementation of a large software/data vendor single integrated solution. This solution is pursued by large corporations to solve standardization problems, but ignore the fact that there are "best of breed" products employed by smaller organizations that realize opportunities where undiscovered potential exists. How can one employ the best tools when and where needed? How can one manage such an environment?

The competitive nature of our business, and the seemingly endless advances in technology, provide a sobering perspective on the importance of flexibility and responsiveness in a changing environment. We must think of the ideal solution being: any data; any application; instantaneously available; and intuitive and then define what it will take to get there. Standards are key and must be addressed across all elements of: interface, communication, access, and data. All applications will work seamlessly if each of these elements are addressed. The information technology business is undeniably the weakest in setting standards for data.

An industry data standard to support petroleum industry professionals does exist. The Public Petroleum Data Model (PPDM) is a cost effective, proven standard solution and has significant implementation throughout the world. PPDM is not difficult to implement or maintain and has many compliant software products available through vendor members that cover all aspects of the petroleum business.

PPDM compliant software allows integration of all aspects of the petroleum business including land; geophysics; geology; reserves; facilities; production; stratigraphy; inventory and records management (seismic data/well cores/interpretations/...); contracts; business associates and more.