The Challenge
After a significant document digitization project of over 200,000 leases and files, a team lead by Whiting Petroleum’s Senior Applications Systems Analyst & Project Manager, Amelia Dias Da Silva, and their Director of Robotic Process
Automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Enterprise Content Management recognized the need for better visibility into the risks, obligations, and valuable content of their newly digitized documents.
The Whiting team understood that these documents, including leases, commercial agreements, marketing contracts, and operations agreements, were more than just pixels and paper – they are valuable business-driving commodities that have an opportunity to create a competitive advantage for Whiting if properly and efficiently utilized. As savvy business leaders, they began evaluating Artificial Intelligence solutions to supercharge their document management efforts. Document Digitization and Document Management is vital – but these efforts alone do not create document understanding, and this is what Whiting was after.
After a paid proof-of-concept with a technology company claiming to provide this value for Whiting, the team was not confident with the consistency and accuracy of the results. However, this process solidified what the team
suspected: the next step in their digital transformation would be incredibly beneficial if executed well. Whiting reached out to ThoughtTrace for a meeting, and the results were astounding! ThoughtTrace was consistent, accurate, and even able to identify previously unknown gaps in the data and documents – showing the Whiting team that the data in their system of record needed to be reexamined. Whiting had zero reservation and was ready to move forward with ThoughtTrace.
“It was quite a feat to turn this around. We have really high confidence in ThoughtTrace.”
Amelia Dias Da Silva, Senior Applications Systems Analyst & Project Manager
In late March, economic changes accelerated the need for Whiting to respond with an in-depth shut-in analysis for a critical asset. In early April 2020, the Land Operations team was asked to provide an operations assessment including Shut-In, Pugh, Force Majeure, Cessation and Continuous Production across the entirety of Whiting’s 18,267 leases. By their conservative estimates, these reviews would have taken around 5,800 hours and cost almost $400,000.
