New White Paper: The Document Management Lifecycle for Energy Projects
February 16, 2022Every energy asset has a natural lifecycle as do the documents associated with the asset. From securing leases, surface access agreements and confirming subsurface rights, each project requires a significant undertaking and involves a lot of documents.
Most Land departments take a project-centric approach to managing documents. At each stage of an energy asset’s life, from initial prospecting to development, operation and eventual divestment or abandonment, multiple workflows crossing various functional departments are involved. The one constant across all these phases is the need to easily retrieve documents at all stages of development.
Treating each phase and document need as individual projects, however, results in significant duplication of effort that leads to longer project durations, higher costs and potentially compromised business objectives. Couple that with high turnover and new resources that may not be familiar with the project, the inefficiencies are compounded.
Companies that adopt a strategic approach can benefit from lower costs, the ability to move faster than their competition, add value to their assets and improve coordination across each functional department.
A Strategic Approach
Land Services is a document-intensive process often involving thousands of individual instruments that must be identified, retrieved, researched, organized, analyzed and then stored over the long term. When an asset moves from one part of the lifecycle to another, it triggers the need for additional Land Services, frequently requiring a company to access the same documents that were gathered weeks, months or even years earlier. Given the nature of a long-lived energy asset, it isn’t a question of “if” that document will need to be accessed again, it is almost always a matter of “when.”
Unfortunately, it is all too often the case that documents are filed into Bankers Boxes and packed away in a storage closet or saved in a folder deep on a computer hard drive or company shared drive. Unorganized or lost documents can result in expensive rework and even the potential loss of an opportunity.
One of the key benefits of adopting the lifecycle approach is elimination of redundancies, which can quickly snowball into significant unplanned costs. Eliminating redundancies and increasing operational efficiencies help reduce the total cost of Energy projects, whether they are fossil fuels or renewables.
Leveraging Technology – TitleSuite
We realized early on the potential for technology to break down information silos, dramatically reduce redundancy of effort and deliver a higher quality product. So, we built our own platform, TitleSuite, to speed the implementation of the strategic Document Lifecycle approach with clients.
The core benefit of the Document Lifecycle approach is eliminating the inherent redundancy and inefficiency of the project-centric approach to Land services. The result is shorter project timelines, which often leads to reduced costs and faster execution.
In our White Paper Mastering the Document Management Lifecycle in Land Services, we cover the lifecycle approach in more depth and provide a case study describing how one client was able to reduce redundancy by 41% and project cycle time by 30%.