Great Western Operating Company Tackles Post-Production Review in Minutes Instead of Months

Solution

After hearing about ThoughtTrace, Michael Uhrich, Senior Lease Analyst, and Charles Blocker, Lease Analyst, were in total disbelief that a software tool could possibly do what ThoughtTrace claimed. As part of a proof of concept exercise, the ThoughtTrace team processed a large sample set of Great Western leases. The Great Western team was shocked at the results and decided ThoughtTrace was exactly the tool they needed to efficiently and accurately understand every provision in their lease population.

The team began using the ThoughtTrace platform for a full lease review and clean-up effort. They were able to quickly organize, identify, and rename their leases to ensure greater transparency and data integrity across their leasehold. They continued this effort by identifying non-operating leases, removing duplicates, adding tract data, and merging linked documents. The team is now able to easily pull reports for Shut-In, Royalty, and Pugh language directly from the contract data. This cleanup effort was no small task for Mike and Charles but would not have been possible without ThoughtTrace. Most importantly, their efforts have paid dividends for Great Western.

"We certainly won’t be outsourcing anymore!" Michael Uhrich Senior Lease Analyst

Results

The data clean-up project allowed Great Western to understand and organize their data and leases with unprecedented clarity. They are now able to quickly and confidently complete due diligence projects. Prior to purchasing ThoughtTrace, Great Western used a combination of internal and external resources for a period of two months to perform a post-production review. They are now able to easily handle the same type of project with ThoughtTrace in just days. The time saved is not just on due diligence, but on the ability to add information to their documents, record their previous work, and build upon their knowledge base, essentially eliminating the need to do data clean up before every project.

One example of Great Western’s efficiency improvements came on the morning of the ThoughtTrace Denver User Group Meeting. Mike and Charles received a request to review the post-production language in leases within a particular spacing unit in response to an inquiry. They knew there would be some instances where they could deduct and others where they couldn’t. Because of their data clean-up effort and comfort with ThoughtTrace, they casually took care of the request in a single morning. They simply uploaded the leases, ran the queries they needed, and submitted the report to management. They then joined ThoughtTrace later that morning at the user conference! With a traditional review method, it would have taken at least a week with “brain draining” manual review and significant anxiety about the results they were able to return. Instead, they easily completed a critical analysis and are fully confident in the data integrity of the results.

The Land Administration Team is now sharing the ThoughtTrace efficiencies across the organization by adding a Landman user with the ability to review leases. Today, he returns detailed lease data – acreage limitations, force majeure, and more. ThoughtTrace was immediately intuitive to him and a huge time saver.