Custom Software Design and Development using Microsoft .NET Technology - Denver - Orbonyx Corp.

ABOUT US
OUR PROJECTS

Integrated Oil & Gas Production System (IPS)
for an International Oil & Gas Corporation
GOAL: This project's goal is to improve corporate financial and operational performance via better informed and more timely management decisions regarding producing oil & gas wells while increasing awareness of the firm's employees of the progress made toward oil & gas production targets. A secondary goal is to improve operational efficiency.
SOLUTION: A custom developed Business Intelligence system based on warehoused data was determined to be the optimum tool to achieve these strategic goals. Also required is improved accuracy of reported net oil & gas production in conjunction with links to the firm's forecasted annual production goals for direct comparison of actual production vs. forecast production on a well by well, field by field and division by division basis. The solution also requires a tool, with built-in checks and balances, for establishing and maintaining the relationships (one to many, many to many, many to one) between oil & gas producing properties in 4 different systems.
CHALLENGES: The main challenge to be faced was that the data required to produce the desired results resides in 4 disparate systems, a production recording system (Landmark's TOW), a production forecast system (Landmark's ARIES), an accounting system (on Unidata) and the Daily Production Reporting System (in-house). Each of these systems has a different perspective on the set of producing properties managed by the firm (one-to-one matches rarely exist).
IMPLEMENTATION: Since the Daily Oil & Gas Production Reporting System engineered by Orbonyx was quite successful, Orbonyx was asked to help design and implement this new Business Intelligence system. Orbonyx used UML Modeling and built upon the extensible architecture of the existing Microsoft .NET based Daily Production Reporting system. The system was designed as an enterprise grade intranet Web application using ASP.NET, IIS, Windows 2000 Server, Oracle 8i RDBMS, PL/SQL, XML Web Services, Windows Services, and VB.NET, with a fully object oriented n-tier distributed architecture and contains some 70,000 lines of programming code (approximately one third was automatically generated).
RESULTS: This Business Intelligence System is now in production use by the firms employees. This system now allows employees to view their business critical corporate data with ease in ways they never thought possible. The firm is currently using the system's easy to use administrative functions to integrate well properties between the disparate systems. Because of this new integrated perspective of the corporation's producing oil & gas well data, employees are able to proactively find and eliminate data discrepancies that would have easily been overlooked before, vastly improving the quality of data within the individual computing systems. This increase in data quality thereby improves the quality and timeliness of related business decisions. Other oil firms are currently evaluating purchasing licenses for this system as it's utility and ease of use are obvious once seen.

Training Facility Interactive Web Site
Orbonyx rescued a partially completed interactive web project by finishing the web site for a computer training facility. The incomplete web project was originally built by another firm using DreamWeaver. Orbonyx made the site fully operational by integrating the existing work with an ASP.NET Web Application using C# (C Sharp programming language) to handle customer requests for information about specific course offerings, pricing, customer pre-registration, and presenting course schedules dynamically from data in SQL Server 2000. Additional functionality was also added that supports their sales staff via automatic e-mail notifications and dynamically generated web pages that conveys information from perspective customers directly to their sales department instantly.

Daily Oil & Gas Production Reporting System
GOAL: The goal of this project for an international oil & gas company was to provide timely and pre-verified oil & gas production data quickly and effortlessly to employees worldwide on demand. With fingertip access to production data, managers and other employees can monitor the progress of the firm towards its production goals on a daily basis and make informed business decisions based on this very timely information.
SOLUTION: In order to accomplish this goal, a web based delivery system for reports had to be put in place with an underlying sub-system for grouping of wells in the data warehouse to match organizational structure (by division, area, and field), data correction, data warehousing, and data verification followed by report publishing. Since the company's Production Accountants, in various geographic locations, needs access to these administrative functions, a web based solution is ideal for these functions as well.
IMPLEMENTATION: By taking advantage of Microsoft's newest software development platform, Visual Studio.NET, VB.NET, ASP.NET and XML Web Services, Orbonyx, in the role of lead design architect and implementer, completed this project in 2001. For rock-solid stability, future extensibility and scalability, Orbonyx implemented this project as an enterprise grade intranet web application using a state-of-the-art distributed n-tier object oriented architecture. Because our experience with Visual Studio.NET proved it was an extremely stable development platform even in pre-release form, our client agreed with us that it would not be sensible to spend limited IT dollars building a system that would be immediately outdated upon completion. Plus, the myriad of potential benefits of using the .NET platform were very difficult to ignore. While there were risks inherent to this approach, we agreed to fully develop this new system using Microsoft's Beta 2 release of Visual Studio.NET. The completed .NET application was released for production use the same week Microsoft officially released Visual Studio.NET to the world. The project utilizes web services and Crystal Reports and also uses .NET and COM interoperability to leverage existing programming thereby saving development time and costs. This highly successful project also uses Oracle 8i for the relational database backend. This application was one of the very first enterprise grade business applications in the world released to a full production environment using Microsoft's .NET platform! As it turned out, the risk of using a pre-release development product from Microsoft was well worth taking.
RESULTS: All employees now have instant access to pre-verified daily production data via an entire corporate rollup report and individual business unit reports. These reports are accessible through a single web page and are used to quickly determine how well each Business Unit is progressing toward their production goals and quickly identifies which producing fields may need attention. In addition, the Production Accountants for each Business Unit have a web based tool to pre-view the data, warehouse the data, and correct errors before these business critical reports are published for general use.

WEB INCENTIVE CREDIT INPUT &
WEB SALES REPORTING TOOL - US West & Qwest
GOAL: To decrease errors and improve throughput and productivity of the incentive credit process for Business and Government sales incentive payments. Also to decrease tension (through timeliness and fewer errors) of Sales employees regarding their incentive compensation, and to curtail the hiring of additional administrative help for approval managers through reduced workload.
SOLUTION: Implement a highly scaleable web based workflow tool to quickly record and track all of Qwest's Business and Government Services sales and provide a business-rule driven approval process for Sales compensation.
CHALLENGES: The system must scale to 600 or more users located across the nation. A large nationally recognized software development firm had already been hired to complete this project. That attempt failed miserably because the consultants assigned to this project had little understanding of how to architect a scaleable solution (their solution failed after releasing it to a pilot group consisting of only 20 individuals). All work from this prior attempt was unusable as it was not developed as an enterprise grade solution and was not extensible.
IMPLEMENTATION: Orbonyx, in the role of lead architect and programmer, custom designed (using UML Modeling) and built these two web applications for US West and then revised it for Qwest after the merger. The web based Sales Reporting System ran on a pair of NT 4 servers located in Colorado. Both the Incentive Credit Input and Sales Reporting System are fully COM and MTS based object-oriented multi-tier web applications using IIS and SQL Server 2000.
RESULTS: In only two months time this workflow application was released to production to a pilot group and passed stress tests simulating 5000 simultaneous users. With only minor fine tuning, after two weeks time this highly stable application was rolled out across the country. This workflow application now has over 2000 users nationwide and scaled, using the original hardware much further then US West/QWEST had originally requested in their requirements. Sales employees were able to record their sales quickly and directly into the corporate database via their web browsers. The system's set of table driven automated business rules checking was able to get the correct sales information to the right manager for compensation approval in a very streamlined and timely paperless process. This process now requires significantly fewer approval rejections and re-submittals of sales data then the firm has ever seen and reduced the workload of the approving managers. This project was so successful for US West, that after the merger, QWEST was quick to adopt this process in the new organization.

WELL INFORMATION TRACKING SYSTEM - Texaco USA
GOAL: This project's goal was to increase Texaco's competitiveness by decreasing the cycle time from a well project's inception to the point where drilling rigs were deployed thereby improving the bottom line by allowing more wells to be drilled per year with the same staffing levels.
SOLUTION: Design and build a portfolio management tool for drilling oil & gas wells as well as a virtual team collaboration and workflow tool to link all the individuals in various departments and locations so the process of getting a well to the drilling stage would be streamlined.
IMPLEMENTATION: Orbonyx Corp. completed "WebWITS" by architecting the application first using UML Modeling then implemented it as a fully object-oriented multi-tier web application using COM+, MTS, IIS, Windows 2000 Server and either Oracle 8i or MS SQL Server 2000 for the relational data store.
RESULTS: In 2000, Texaco's Vice President of e-Business stated that the web based Well Information Tracking System was the best example of applying e-business within Texaco world-wide. "WebWITS" has been used to inventory and track approximately 3000 drilling projects to date, and is used by approximately 600 Texaco professionals in various disciplines from Exploration Geologists, Land, Comptrollers, Drilling, Right-of-Way, as well as managers tracking project progress and others. The application was also used to develop a backlog of drillable properties so that capital could be targeted toward properties with highest return potential while managing efficient drilling rig scheduling.
AVAILABILITY: Orbonyx solely owns the intellectual property of this product and use licenses are available. Contact Roy Ogborn at Orbonyx Corp. for details.
To see a demonstration of WebWITS, click here: WebWITS. For business benefits click here: WebWITS FAQs Note: Target browser must be Internet Explorer 4 or higher.

PRIOR PROJECTS - 1998 and earlier
Prior to the formation of Orbonyx Corporation, founder Roy Ogborn, was the lead systems analyst & developer with multi-national corporations. The following are some of his accomplishments during his combined 15+ year careers with Texaco USA, Texaco Europe Research Inc, and Foster Wheeler Energy Corporation.

WORKLOAD TRACKING SYSTEM
Lead Analyst & Programmer - Designed, built and deployed a business workflow system that enabled a team of central dispatchers in Texaco Central Assets Land Department to dispatch work to the proper Land Analyst. The system tracked units of work completed and allowed management to adjust workload based on statistical reporting generated by the application. Workload Tracking was a client-server system written using Visual Basic and SQL Server for the data store. The system was used to track workload in multiple workgroups with approximately 60 users.

CO-OWNER MANAGEMENT SYSTEM II
Systems Analyst in Design Team - Designed the COMBS II system to track and manage all gas products, raw and processed, that entered and left Texaco's Maysville Gas Plant in Oklahoma. COMBS II was designed as a process workflow system that could be used in any gas plant. As part of the COMBS II design, key employees were notified via e-mail and pager when tolerances were out of range at any monitoring point within the plant. An important design element was a subsystem for plant engineers so they could dynamically reconfigure the gas calculations in the program whenever the physical plant underwent changes, such as adding/replacing equipment, re-routing pipe-work, and upgrades from manual read meters to automatic wireless meters using graphical diagrams in Visio.

LEASE MAPPING SYSTEM
Lead Developer for graphics portion this GIS system developed in-house by Texaco based on Intergraph's CAD system. Created custom menu system for this VAX/VMS based system. Was brought into this team for Intergraph internals expertise. Customized the Intergraph CAD system to produce land maps from compressed data and allow CAD operators to verify and update lease boundaries, and lease systems. Linked graphical data to an external hierarchical data base. Later, converted this system to run on Unix based systems.

SEISMIC LINE INVENTORY SYSTEM
Lead Analyst & Programmer - SLIP is a library system used to manage the inventory of seismic line and seismic processing data that was in Texaco's possession, both in local storage and offsite storage. Since data from this system is location dependent, the data was linked to the Texaco proprietary mapping system to graphically locate seismic lines in inventory. The system was used to aid in the sale and purchase of seismic data. The system was written in Visual Basic and used Oracle (via Oracle Objects for Ole) as the data store. This system was designed, built and deployed in 1995 and is still in use today in its original form.

SEISMIC PROCESSING COMPUTER CENTER - MOSCOW, USSR
System Manager / Mapping Manager - Key team member of team that installed a complete raised-floor computer center in Moscow for seismic processing in a joint venture between Texaco and the Ministry of Foreign Geology of the Soviet Union in 1991-92. Was System Manager of Solbourne Unix Workstations, Intergraph InterPro Workstations, a VAX/VMS system with array processing hardware and PC systems. Aided both US and Soviet geophysicists in using the various systems to process seismic lines, scan seismic sections and produce exploration maps. Also responsible for setting up and maintaining an e-mail system for communication between Moscow and the U.S. Also installed a Macintosh system for the business office in Moscow as well as diagnosing and repairing the various hardware systems. Developed the first Cyrillic font for use on the Intergraph Microstation CAD system. This was a one year, full time assignment on location in Moscow.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN RADIO LEAGUE PAGER SYSTEM
Lead Analyst & Programmer - RMRL Pager is the client software component for an alpha-numeric paging system used by Amateur Radio operators in the Rocky Mountain Region of Colorado. The software was written in Visual Basic as a desktop application. The program uses the PC's modem to call an automated phone system that receives DTMF (touch-tone) signals which in turn sends the intended message to a particular pager for display.

INTERGRAPH SEISMIC INTERPRETATION SYSTEM
Systems Analyst - Lead Texaco's design portion of a joint development effort between Intergraph and Texaco to create Intergraph's Seismic Interpretation System (SIS). The system was completed and released as a product by Intergraph that ran in the Intergraph Computer Aided Design System.

SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR - UNIX SYSTEMS
System Administrator of Unix based Intergraph InterPro CAD systems and Sun Workstations. Performed initial setup of the machines, networking support and user support of the MicroStation CAD system on the InterPro machines and GeoQuest on the Sun Workstations. Provided Unix training to the workstation users and to other software developers in both Denver and Houston.