From Weeks to Hours: What Big Pharma Figured Out That Oil and Gas Still Hasn’t

Eric Fidler told us a story on Wisdom at the Wellhead that had nothing to do with oil and gas, and it might be the most important thing he said all day.

Before Sensia, before the oilfield automation work he's known for, Eric was leading a business unit at Rockwell in process automation. One of his projects was for the pharmaceutical industry. Three major multinational plants. The challenge was drug quarantine. Every batch of drugs that came off the manufacturing line had to sit in quarantine while the data was validated. Paper records. Manual checks. Weeks of waiting before a product that had already been manufactured could be released for distribution.

Eric's team implemented electronic batch release. Brand new technology at the time. The FDA accepted it. And it shrunk that quarantine time from weeks to hours. Not weeks to days. Weeks to hours. Three multinational plants running on the same standard. A major revenue stream for Rockwell. And a complete transformation of how those companies moved product from the line to the market.

When he told us that, I sat there doing the math in my head. Because I know exactly what a version of that problem looks like in oil and gas. And I know we haven't solved it yet.

The Quarantine We Don't Call Quarantine

We don't use the word quarantine in the oilfield. But we've got our own version of it, and it costs us just as much.

Think about what happens when production data sits on somebody's desk waiting to be entered. The well produced yesterday. The numbers are real. But they're sitting in a field book, or in a file on a laptop, or in somebody's head, waiting for a person to manually key them into a system. And until that happens, nobody downstream can act on them. The engineer can't optimize. The accountant can't close the books. The manager can't make the call about the next workover. Everybody's waiting on data that already exists but hasn't been validated and moved into the system.

Eric made this exact point later in our conversation when he talked about disconnecting manual processes. He said you go in someone's desk and you wait for them to get at it. Days go by. Time is money. That's the quarantine. It doesn't have an FDA label on it, but it costs the same way. Every day that data sits unvalidated is a day you can't act on it. And every day you can't act on it is a day you're making decisions on old information or no information at all.

I've watched this play out at Total Stream for years. An operator will have good data coming off the wellhead. The sensors are working. The SCADA is running. But somewhere between the field and the office, there's a manual step that adds hours or days to the cycle. And in those hours and days, the window for the best decision closes. You end up reactive instead of proactive. You're always a step behind, not because you don't have the data, but because the data didn't get where it needed to go fast enough for anyone to use it.

What Pharma Understood That We Still Don't

Here's what struck me about Eric's pharma story. The drugs were already manufactured. They were already good. The chemistry was done. The product was sitting right there. But nobody could touch it until the data proved it was safe to release. The bottleneck wasn't the manufacturing. It was the validation.

Electronic batch release solved that by building the validation into the process itself. Real-time data capture. Automated checks against the standard. No manual transcription. No paper trail waiting for a signature. The data was validated as it was created, and the moment the batch was complete, the system could confirm it was ready to ship.

Now think about what that means for an oil and gas operation. If you could validate production data at the source, in real time, and move it into a structured system the moment it's captured, you eliminate the quarantine. You eliminate the desk. You eliminate the days of waiting. The engineer sees what the well did this morning, not what it did last Thursday. The financial data ties to the production data automatically. The manager makes decisions on the current reality, not on a report that was already old by the time it was printed.

That's not a fantasy. That's what good data architecture does. I've always told people, it's okay to be creative with the data you use to find better solutions. But it's not okay to be creative with the structure in which that data hits. The pharma industry learned that lesson in the nineties. They built the structure, automated the validation, and went from weeks to hours. We're still arguing about whether it's worth the investment to get the data off somebody's desk.

Why Looking Outside the Oilfield Matters

One of the things I appreciated about that conversation was Kevin's observation that Rockwell and Schlumberger aren't just oil and gas companies. Rockwell is in solar, automotive, steel. Eric said his business unit even had a group doing batch control in breweries. Sensia brings Rockwell's automation depth together with Schlumberger's oilfield domain knowledge, but the automation principles didn't originate in oil and gas. They were proven in industries that had no choice but to get the data right because a regulator was watching.

Pharma had the FDA. If the data wasn't validated, the product didn't ship. Period. There was no workaround. No side spreadsheet. No "we'll get to it next week." The consequence was immediate and non-negotiable. And because of that, they invested in getting the validation right at the source.

We don't have the FDA standing over our shoulder in the oilfield. And honestly, I'm not arguing we should. But the discipline that the pharma industry was forced to develop is the same discipline that would transform how oil and gas companies operate. Not because a regulator demands it. Because the economics demand it. Every day your data sits in quarantine on somebody's desk is a day your competitor is making decisions in real time. And over a year, that adds up to a gap you can't close by working harder. You can only close it by moving faster. And you can only move faster if the data is validated and available the moment it's captured.

What This Means for Operators Right Now

Find your quarantine. Every operation has a bottleneck where good data sits waiting for a human to move it. It might be production reporting. It might be the handoff between field and accounting. It might be the gap between your SCADA system and your management platform. Find the place where validated data is sitting idle, and that's where you start. That's your quarantine. Kill it and everything downstream speeds up.

Automate the validation, not just the collection. A lot of companies have invested in collecting more data. Sensors everywhere. SCADA running on every pad. But if that data still has to pass through a manual validation step before anyone trusts it, you haven't solved the problem. You've just moved the bottleneck. The data needs to be validated at the source, automatically, against a structure that the whole organization agrees is the standard. That's what electronic batch release did for pharma. That's what real-time data architecture does for oil and gas.

Stop treating the desk as an acceptable delay. The pharma industry looked at weeks of quarantine and said this is unacceptable. We need to treat days of data delay the same way. A report that's three days old isn't a report. It's a history lesson. And history lessons don't help you optimize a well that's underperforming right now. If your team has accepted multi-day data lag as normal, that's not a workflow. That's a cost you've stopped counting.

Final Thought

Three pharmaceutical plants. Quarantine time from weeks to hours. One standard. Real-time validation. The FDA signed off on it. It became a major revenue line for Rockwell. And it happened decades ago.

We're still walking production reports from the field to the office in this industry. We're still waiting on somebody to get to the data sitting on their desk. We're still making decisions on information that's hours or days old when the technology to make it available in real time has existed for years.

The pharma industry didn't have a choice. The regulator forced them to solve it. We have a choice. And the operators who make the right one, the ones who build the validation into the architecture and eliminate the quarantine between the wellhead and the decision, are the ones who are going to outrun everybody still waiting on the paper.

Eric Fidler has built automation solutions across oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, and heavy industry. On Wisdom at the Wellhead, he shares how a cross-industry career taught him that the principles of real-time data validation don't change, only the stakes do.