Effective management requires innovative solutions
The effective management of resources – such as skilled labor, tools and parts – in environments with geographically-dispersed assets demands innovative solutions. Constantly seeking to increase productivity while reducing operational costs, many businesses are turning to technology in order to respond to asset service issues while tracking service cycle times and providing management with a real-time view of effectiveness.

Exception Based Surveillance (EBS) helps eliminate waste in an engineer’s day, by removing unnecessary analysis and allowing the engineer to focus on the highest value tasks. For the surveillance of oil wells, an efficient and effective way to achieve this is to use an automated Exception Based Surveillance System, often augmented by data-driven well rate estimates.”
Leveraging Data-driven Exception Based Surveillance to Maximize Returns in Times of Low Oil Prices, Society of Petroleum Engineers

Why Exception-Based Surveillance (EBS)?
EBS, also known as Exception-Based Management, is an operating philosophy where work is intelligently generated and founded on standards and monitoring by exception. It’s focused on eliminating waste from the value stream to continuously improve safety, quality, delivery, cost and human performance.

There’s an extensive range of literature and research available, and EBS is discussed extensively in Intelligent Digital Oil and Gas Fields: Concepts, Collaboration, and Right-time Decisions, which serves as “a reference that can help managers, engineers, operations, and IT experts understand specifics on how to filter data to create useful information, address analytics, and link workflows across the production value chain enabling teams to make better decisions with a higher degree of certainty and reduced risk.”

That’s what EBS is all about – helping personnel to respond to what’s important, and not be distracted the rest of the time.

EBS applications

“Advanced applications for EBS can help natural gas firms reduce wasted time and effort in monitoring gas fields and wells, while also automating workflows for greater efficiency.”
How Monitoring by Exception Should Work

Well surveillance is a time-consuming process when performed manually, and the efficiency and effectiveness of surveillance production data is degraded by manual analysis. On the other hand, the implementation of machine learning methods and big data analytics offered by EBS enables the prediction of the health of wells and improves production and efficiency. It facilitates a proactive approach that produces faster response times for intervention, minimizing well downtime, safeguarding production and contributing to cost savings.

EBS in action
Some of our customers have achieved great results from integrating EBS. Using the digitalization provided by the Mobideo Platform, Hess Corporation has succeeded in increasing the efficiency of their management of thousands of assets – geographically dispersed over about 550,000 net acres – at their operation in North Dakota.

“We use digital transformation to run better diagnostics and perform better analyses that get people the right information at the right time. Our people are still doing the same work, but it is digitized and consistent, which means I have to deal with much less emails and calls.”
Sten Tham – Area Lead, Hess Corporation

As reported in our Case Study, which explores the specific process in more detail, results included a 35% reduction in processing time; ~90% reduction in signals concerning pumping unit belt spillage and ~30% improvement in success rate utilizing full value stream; and a full statistical and machine learning model for tubing leakages with ~360 signals in 2019 and a saving of ~3 days of troubleshooting time per event, which in turn saved the loss of 220 barrels of production (~100,000 barrels per year).

All this was covered in detail at the ARC Industry Forum Orlando 2020, where Sten Tham, Area Lead at Hess Corporation, presented “Bridging the Gap between IT & OT to Drive Operational Excellence – An EBS Case Study”. Additionally, in his interview with Craig Resnick, VP Consulting at ARC Advisory Group, on the subject of digitalization and the benefits of a connected workforce and EBS, he noted that “EBS monitoring is almost a complete philosophical change about how workers can perform in the field… It’s about allowing the equipment to speak to us. You put digitalization equipment on all your equipment and by condition monitoring the equipment, it will tell you whether it’s working or not and therefore, you can more effectively use resources, because the same resource is not going to have to verify everything. The system is telling us what’s wrong.”

The increased efficiency offered by EBS ensures that engineers focus on analysis rather than identification. It eliminates repetitive data gathering and reformatting tasks, ensuring consistency and repeatability of evaluation and better knowledge management.