From Calculators to Cloud: Building the Automated Oil Company

Why visibility, repeatability, and trust now scale faster than headcount

There was a time when production ran on clipboards and end‑of‑month

emails. Teams did their best with partial truths and late reports. Then the

tools caught up: secure cloud, low‑cost sensing, and integrated workflows that

finally let operators see the whole field at once.

What changed

• Connectivity matured. Field data can move securely from the lease to the office in seconds.
• Software got specific. Purpose‑built upstream suites now connect well operations, land, accounting, and production into one flow.
• Leaders built around decisions, not dashboards. The best teams map their critical decisions first—then instrument the field to feed those calls with live data.

Three shifts that define a modern operator

1. One data spine. Standard well and equipment IDs across engineering, accounting, and vendors cut re‑keying and error drag.
2. Field‑to‑office automation. Capture once at the source; let it flow forward.
3. Exception‑based management. Stop reading everything. Surface what’s off‑trend and act today—not next month.

How to start this quarter

• Name the decisions you must take weekly (e.g., lift changes, workovers, vendor approvals).
• Instrument for those decisions first (sensors, daily allocations, work order status).
• Unify the hand‑offs (production → accounting → vendor) in one integrated suite.
• Make the truth visible with a daily operating view everyone can see—then meet on it.

Final thought

Technology is only as good as the trust it builds. When people see the same

truth at the same time, alignment follows—and performance goes with it.

To go deeper, watch the full conversation with Robert Wichert on the Wisdom at the Wellhead YouTube channel here - https://youtu.be/wTEYnWUMbBg