The Hidden Cost of Disorganized Drilling

There is a person at every fast-moving operator who is the keeper of the spreadsheet.

Their job description does not say that. It says scheduler, or planner, or operations coordinator, or sometimes just engineer. But what they actually do, what fills their days, is maintain a single Excel file that the rest of the company depends on and that nobody else is allowed to touch. They copy and paste. They drag rows around to keep the order right. They re-sort columns. They publish a fresh version on Monday and another fresh version on Tuesday because Monday's version is already wrong. They sit in a weekly drilling meeting where most of the conversation is about what the spreadsheet should say next.

I have watched plenty of operators run this way over the years and call it "managing the schedule." It is not. It is paying a salary to the chaos.

That is the thing I kept hearing when I listened to Bob Baldwin on the show.

Bob has been writing oil and gas software with me since 1996, and he is the lead architect on Operation Scheduler, the rig scheduling product we represent through Total Stream. He came to the project the same way the best products always come to existence in this business. He saw a customer in pain and decided to do something about it.

The Full-Time Job That Should Not Exist

The customer was Energen Resources out of Birmingham, Alabama. Bob was already working with them on data interchanges, and they showed him how they were running their drilling and completion schedule. It was an Excel spreadsheet. They were tracking fifteen drilling rigs and ten completion crews on it. They had a full-time person whose entire job was maintaining the file.

Bob said it on the show in plain language:

"Once you get past two rigs, things get way too complicated."

That is the whole problem in one line. Once you are past two rigs, you have more moving pieces than a spreadsheet can honestly carry. Permits in flight. AFEs at different stages of approval. Land that is signed in some places and unsigned in others. Site locations that may or may not be ready. A rig that is supposed to spud Tuesday but cannot because the land has not been signed. And every one of those facts is changing every day, sometimes more than once a day.

So the keeper of the spreadsheet is not really keeping a schedule. The keeper of the spreadsheet is doing manual data plumbing on a system that was never built for what they are using it for. And the moment a rig gets delayed, every dependency downstream of that rig has to be moved by hand, in order, without breaking the formatting that everyone else is depending on. By the time the file is correct, it is wrong again.

What you are paying for is not a schedule. What you are paying for is the cost of pretending you have one.

What Changes When the Spreadsheet Goes Away

Bob asked Energen if he could take a whack at it, and what he ended up building was the early version of what we now call Operation Scheduler. The first thing it did, the thing the customer reacted to immediately, was let you change the schedule by dragging and dropping a time bar onto a different rig, a different location, or a different date.

That sounds small. It is not.

Every operator I have watched run a scheduler in Excel has the same problem when something has to move. A rig is delayed because of a repair, or a blowout, or weather, and now every well behind that rig needs to slide. In a spreadsheet, that is hours of manual work. In Operation Scheduler, you extend the time bar on the delayed rig and the rest of the line moves automatically. Everything else on that crew, in order, gets pushed out together. The downstream dependencies do not get forgotten because they are not being maintained by hand anymore.

Then there is the scenario problem, which most operators get wrong because they were never given a way to get it right. You do not actually want to change the master schedule the moment somebody has an idea. You want to mock up what the schedule would look like under a different set of assumptions, run it past everybody who has to live with the result, and only commit to it once the team agrees. In the spreadsheet world, that means making a copy of the file and renaming it, which is how you end up with eight versions floating around and no one knows which one is the live one. Operation Scheduler lets you build a scenario as a separate object, get sign-off, and then archive the old master and promote the scenario in a single command.

That is not a software trick. That is the difference between a company that runs by reaction and a company that runs on purpose.

The CFO Can Finally See the Burn Rate

The piece of this that intrigued me when Bob first walked me through it was the financial overlay. Every time bar in the system carries an AFE amount and a duration, which means at any given moment you can roll up your burn rate across the entire drilling and completion program, by month, by rig, by team, however you want to slice it.

Now think about what that means in a real conversation. Your CFO comes in and says you need to slow down because cash is tight. In the spreadsheet world, that conversation is a long one. Somebody has to go figure out which rigs to release, which wells to push, what the new burn looks like, and bring it back next week. In Operation Scheduler, you drag three rigs out of the active program into a scenario, see the new burn rate immediately, and decide whether that is the answer or not. The same thing works in reverse. The CFO comes in with extra capital and says go faster. You drag three new rigs in, see the cost, and commit if the math works.

The schedule and the budget stop being two different conversations.

I have spent a long time around operators who treated their drilling schedule and their financial outlook as two different documents managed by two different teams that occasionally compared notes in a meeting. I have nodded along in plenty of those meetings, where everyone agreed the schedule and the budget were aligned, and nobody in the room was actually in a position to know whether that was true. That worked at small scale, and it has never worked at the scale most independents are running today. The schedule is the budget. The budget is the schedule. If you cannot see them together, in real time, you are guessing.

A schedule you cannot afford is not a schedule. It is a wish list.

The Wells You Have Already Forgotten About

There are wells losing you money right now that nobody at your company has thought about in weeks. They are not on the active drilling program. They are not on the active completion program. They are workover candidates that quietly stacked up while everyone was paying attention to the rigs that are running, and the longer they sit there, the more they cost.

I have watched this pattern at every operator I have ever walked through, and the cause is always the same. The schedule is in one place, the workover backlog is in another place, and nobody owns the seam between them. So the highest-impact workover in the company is buried in somebody's email thread, and the rig that finally gets to it gets there four months too late.

Operation Scheduler has two pieces that take this problem head on.

The first is the readiness report. Every well on the schedule has a list of things that have to be true before you can drill it. Land has to be signed. AFE has to be approved. Permit has to be issued. Site location has to be ready. The system tracks all of those as flags on each well, you can configure the list to fit how your company actually runs, and the report tells you at a glance which wells are ready, which are stuck on what, and which have not been started yet at all. That sounds simple, and it is, and that is the point. The whole team stops rediscovering the same blocker on Monday morning because the blocker is already named, attributed, and in front of the right person.

The second is what Bob calls the bullpen. That is the list of wells that are planned but not yet on the schedule, and it is sortable by how many barrels of oil equivalent per day you are losing while they sit there. Because Operation Scheduler integrates with Total Asset Manager, those production numbers are real and current, not a number somebody typed into a spreadsheet six months ago and never updated. You sort the bullpen by lost production, drag the highest-impact well onto the schedule when you are ready to attack it, and the line accommodates.

The wells you have already forgotten about are not really forgotten. They are sitting on a list nobody opens. The point of the bullpen is to make sure somebody opens that list, in order, every week.

Final Thought

The reason this story matters beyond Energen is that the same pattern shows up at every operator I have ever walked through.

The cost of disorganization does not appear on any line item. There is no field on the budget that says "salary for the person who keeps the spreadsheet alive" or "weekly meeting time spent arguing about which version of the schedule is current" or "rigs sitting because nobody noticed the AFE was not approved." Those costs are real. They are spread across a dozen people's calendars and never aggregated. They show up as the difference between the program you planned and the program you actually executed, and most operators never go back to check why those two numbers were not the same.

What Bob built is not a calendar. It is a way of getting the cost of chaos out of your operations and back onto a real budget line where you can decide whether to pay it or stop paying it.

Most operators, once they see it, decide to stop paying it.

Bob Baldwin is a petroleum operations engineer and data architect who has co-developed two industry-leading data management platforms. He is the lead architect on Operation Scheduler, a drag-and-drop rig and operations scheduling system that integrates with Total Asset Manager. On Wisdom at the Wellhead, Kevin Fischer sits down with Bob and Jeff Dyk to talk about the Energen scheduling problem that started Operation Scheduler, the difference between scenarios and master schedules, and why a spreadsheet that needs a full-time keeper is not actually a schedule.