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Knowledge Management Questar Callon St. Mary Land Energy Company Evarts- Tremaine- Flicker Fidelity Exploration All Studies |
Case StudyCallon Petroleum CompanyImaging initiative provides disaster-planning and document access solution to mid-sized energy company.Business Challenge: Provide an affordable, efficient Imaging solution as a part of an overall disaster-planning initiative, while at the same time improving storage and retrieval of land files, mineral deeds, well files, contracts and other documents. Solution: Software - DocVue Document Manager® Suite, DocVue Imaging , MS Access 2000 Hardware - Bell + Howell 1000FB scanner, Dell Pentium III server, Dell Pentium III scan station, Microsoft Windows NT network Background Callon Petroleum Company has been engaged in the exploration, development, acquisition and operation of oil and gas properties in the Gulf Coast region since 1950. The Company's properties are geographically concentrated in Louisiana, Alabama and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. There are approximately 100 staff members in Callon's head office in Natchez, MS. "We had been discussing an imaging and Electronic Document Management initiative for some time, but a small fire in an adjacent office made us realize how important it is to include Imaging in an overall disaster recovery plan," says Ken Maples, Callon's Manager of Acquisitions/New Ventures and the sponsoring manager of the initiative. "The DocVue suite was the perfect fit for us because of it's functionality, existing integration with our Excalibur land system, and price-point." Implementation and Customization The first step was to understand the specific documents that were to be Imaged and establish an intuitive indexing scheme. Work began in February 2000. "We don't expect to be scanning a huge volume of documents initially (around 5,000 per month), but we do have a wide variety of document types," said Maples. "It was very important that our users be able to retrieve documents using search criteria that were intuitive and comprehensive." Full Circle worked with Callon to establish an indexing scheme, and came up with 21 unique fields that captured all of the required information for a variety of lease, deed, well, legal and other documents. Bar-coded header sheets were used to identify each one of the five different document types. DocVue Imaging was configured to 'read' each bar code so the appropriate combination of index fields that apply to that document type were presented at the indexing stage. "We also asked Full Circle to route certain document types to specific users for indexing," said Maples. "The idea was to put certain documents in front of the user who knew the most about that document so they could quickly apply the appropriate index information." This presented a further challenge. "We needed a tool to allow these 'knowledge workers' to easily index documents. Full Circle built a simple custom application that allowed our users to do this at their desktops before releasing the image to the DocVue repository. It works like a charm!" said Maples. The 'Remote Indexing' application was built using an MS Access 2000 database as an intermediate step between DocVue Imaging and the DocVue Document Manager repository. Users see the scanned image along side indexing fields, allowing them to fill in the appropriate information. Included in the form is an interface that provides efficient entry of Section, Township and Range coordinates. "Many documents are associated with multiple combinations of Section, Township and Range. This interface cuts data entry time in half or better," said Maples. Excalibur™ Integration Before undertaking the Imaging initiative, Callon had recently purchased the Land Suite modules of the Excalibur™ Energy Management System. It was important to leverage the large amount of data entry work that had already been done when indexing scanned documents. "It didn't seem to make a lot of sense to re-enter index information that had already been keystroked," said Maples, "so we took advantage of DocVue's existing integration with Excalibur and auto-populated as much information as we could." To ensure that these parallel databases stayed updated and in sync with the most recent information, Excalibur was designated as the primary database and a 'bridge' application was written to ensure that the index data contained in DocVue reflected any changes in Excalibur™. Document Access As is the case with most DocVue installations, it was a requirement to restrict access to certain documents. Confidential legal documents were assigned to a separate batch class and given their own unique bar-coded header sheet. "It was a high priority for us to be able to keep our confidential documents confidential," said Maples. "We went so far as to assign the task of scanning these documents to a different staff member. We found that the system was easy to learn and we had no trouble training more than one operator to scan and index documents." After indexing, these documents were released to the DocVue Document Manager repository with strict access limitations, allowing document access to only selected users. Results The system was operational by early April 2000. "DocVue has certainly met our expectations. We've started Imaging a variety of documents and our file room is steadily shrinking," says Maples. "As more documents come on-line, our users are realizing the benefits of the system. They have faster, easier access to documents, and management is happy because we no longer face the risk of losing our paper documents to an unforeseen disaster." Back To Case Studies |
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