Ensign Drilling Inc. is a global leader in drilling and servicing wells for the North American and international markets. They are one of the largest drillers in Canada, providing drilling services for customers in the oil, gas and geothermal sector. With revenues of approximately $2.4B, Ensign is a leader in the energy sector. Since their founding in 1987, the publicly traded, Canadian company focuses on ensuring integrity, learning and teamwork in all that they do. They offer powerful solutions through their expertise and a well-rounded offering of land-based services for oil, gas and geothermal energy.
Over the past few years, Kymera Systems helped Ensign with the development, rollout, and support of their drilling rig data historian. Ensign deployed it to many of their rigs worldwide with all of the data being collected and managed by an on-premises enterprise historian. Kymera Systems built a solid foundation, with Inductive Automation‘s Ignition SCADA solution, to create Ensign’s enterprise historian. As Ensign grew, due to acquisitions and internal expansion, there was an increase in both the amount of data sources, and the velocity of incoming data from each source. In addition, there was a need to increase the availability and performance of the historian, as the number of users and external integrations increased. The next logical step in scaling the enterprise historian was a move to the cloud. With the current and future growth, Ensign wanted to get more value from their operational data by leveraging the cloud to make data and analytics more available for growth and scale. This would enable users to make faster, better decisions in operations. Ensign also wanted to improve machine health monitoring reports, performance reports, and their advanced alerting system to accelerate access to key operational information.
Ensign came to ShookIOT after spending time investigating other data historians available on the market and a significant amount of time improving the performance of the underlying databases by implementing SSD drives, clustered column store indexing and replication technologies. However, they were still looking for a cloud-based solution with options to adapt, scale and improve. Ensign wanted to take advantage of the many cloud-based IIoT technologies that are more suited for streaming data analytics and knew that ShookIOT had a compelling solution.
The Ultimate Goal
When Ensign came to ShookIOT, they came with a list of desired outcomes for this project. These outcomes included:
- Provide business intelligence solutions thereby providing information and insights that facilitate proactive decision-making, creating a competitive advantage and driving organizational excellence;
- A robust, agile, cloud-based data collection and storage foundation that can provide the organization with benefits, both in terms of efficiency and effectiveness related to decision-making; and
- Improve machine health monitoring reports, performance reports and the advanced alerting system to accelerate access to key operational information.
The data foundation is crucial as the basis for all types of reporting and analytics to successfully implement the long-term vision. Ensign felt that ShookIOT was an excellent solution for their project goals and objectives knowing that ShookIOT could deliver the desired results of simplifying and accelerating their digital transformation journey with their expertise and experience.
Solution and Impact on Ensign Drilling
ShookIOT Fusion Cloud Historian supplemented Ensign’s existing Enterprise Historian operation data in a secure and reliable manner. ShookIOT’s team of engineers, consultants and software developers enabled Ensign to install the ShookIOT Ignition Connector on drilling rigs incorporating Inductive Automation’s Ignition operating history into the Cloud Historian. ShookIOT Fusion Cloud Historian is accelerating data access availability and providing better, faster, more agile decision making for Ensign. The Ensign team has the ability to easily share, collaborate and coordinate across the organization from a single centralized data source regardless of rig operating system or location. ShookIOT Fusion Cloud Historian (with ShookIOT Essentials operational context model embedded within) provides the critical context data foundation and storage required to improve Ensign‘s operational performance and to transform drilling rig system data into information to accelerate the journey to operational excellence.
Implementing an effective data collection and storage foundation in the cloud provides trusted and integrated data that turns raw information into actionable alarms in a timely manner. One-stop shopping for data, a single version of the truth, the ability to have a common understanding of the data across the enterprise and facilitating organization communication and collaboration were all achieved in this project. Because of this, Ensign has greater visibility into their drilling rig systems in order to make more effective business decisions.
“Deploying the ShookIOT Ignition Connector Module to Ensign’s rigs was quick and easy. Within minutes, the tag data was flowing from the drilling rigs into Azure and our system users were able to interact with the data using the powerful features in the ShookIOT Fusion Cloud Historian. The ShookIOT Ignition Connector Module has been very solid and there have been no issues with data loss in the two months that we have been using it. The Time Series Insights tool has also been dependable and performs very well when wanting to visualize trends within the drilling rig tag data.”
– Norbert Happ, Project Manager, Wellsite Technology, Ensign Drilling Inc.
