s Kongsberg Digital has interacted with customers in the past six months since the pandemic lockdown, the feedback circles around two main points:
- Operators would have been better equipped to handle their operations if they had been more digitally mature; and
- Workers have embraced digital technology as they experience the benefits directly.
In that sense, 2020 has shown the world’s industries that the time is ripe to start digitalizing.
At the beginning of 2020, most industrial players knew that digitalization would impact business sometime down the line. They had been presented with futurist scenarios of end-to-end interconnectedness and complete insight, and yet they had heard of many digitalization projects that failed. It was reasonable to question not if but when digitalization would make its great dent in the operation of traditional industries (i.e., when the technology was mature enough or when the organization could handle the change that comes with starting to digitalize).
Then a pandemic hit, and the world was forced to stay at home and conduct their work remotely. People’s everyday lives were flipped upside down, and workers needed to find and learn how to use the solutions that allowed them to do their work efficiently, interacting with people and the digital world.
Industrial players should not wonder so much when the huge transformation will hit but rather ask themselves, do I believe digitalization will affect my industry? Is my business prepared for the change that will come? How am I reaping the benefits of digital solutions available today?
Digital solutions have already yielded opportunities at all levels in the oil and gas industry, notable in the offshore operations where cost is higher. The collection, contextualization and sharing of data in common user systems does not only enable the companies to break down the traditional silos between different expert groups. As more data are shared with other trusted vendors, it is possible to unlock new value with large contextualized datasets, giving teams an improved foundation for decision-making in real time and a spur for innovating for even more value. With the advent of COVID-19, digitalization has emerged with an even broader purpose, enabling employees to remain productive at home. Kongsberg Digital ’s focus is to continue to shape technologies that enrich multidisciplinary teams and provide insight as well as elevate worker productivity through seamlessly replication of the office or rig work environment to their home.
Kongsberg Digital’s SiteCom platform for real-time data aggregation and storage was launched almost two decades ago as the new independent approach to standardization of real-time data in the well operations domain industry based on the WITSML standard for data exchange.
Offshore wells are frequently deep and complex, requiring access to the most experienced personnel to ensure safe and efficient well construction. Such people are in high demand, and the introduction of remote operations has allowed higher utilization of their skills, allowing a single person to support multiple operations from a remote real-time operations center or even their office desk.
Each application is independent and unique in its purpose and function. Kongsberg Digital’s applications are tailored to a specific task or workflow, adapted to a user group’s terminology and intuitive with minimal to no training required. The applications offer platform independence; it must work anywhere on any device on any platform (PC, Mac, tablet or mobile). Immediate data is available with a focus on reducing duplicate input entry. The technology is independent from SiteCom core and other application updates, reducing the update overhead for our clients.

The Subsurface Action Review is a subsurface reporting application for operational events and observations. Its aim is to reduce the time it takes the operation geology community to collate, edit and present their findings on an ongoing basis to well stakeholders. After action, reviews from a given hole section and offset analysis are also supported. The efficiency enables the geologists to concentrate on supporting the rig, while not losing their valuable insights along the way.
A secondary example is that cross-referencing the plan during execution of a well operation is crucial to determine if the well is progressing according to the plan and identifying disfunctions. Historically this process has been cumbersome, and an unnecessary time sink due to the lack of open communication between independent data systems. This has resulted in inaccuracies and hand keying identical inputs multiple times.
To streamline this administrative task, Kongsberg Digital has developed an application allowing engineers to link files from external systems to SiteCom. In using the application, updates to the plan will be automatically synchronized across when the plan is amended with, for example, the as-drilled trajectory and section total depth. This also can be used to ingest time summary reporting data to contextualize historical data.
Uncertainty also extends to the size of operations and capex/opex. With little to no warning, a singular event (e.g., a virus) can shred the outlook for the year and its budget. All the SiteCom related products can be hosted and scaled on a monthly subscription basis in terms of both rig and user count depending on the application, which allows customers flexibility to survive the volatility of today’s market. The value of not paying for a solution until it is required can be the difference between a month in the black and a month in the red.