Retail Outlet Management and Distribution.
This covers the distribution of refined petroleum products from the production center to various countries and finally to the retail units like petrol pumps, gas stations and other petroleum products retail stores.
This is the area where a lot of GIS developmental activities can take place. Retail companies can use the power of GIS systems to optimize their business with intelligent analytical GIS tools and planning tools and provide better customer and outlet services.
- Coverage Analysis.
- Fleet management
- Thematic mapping of Petrol stations by brand, ownership, price, volume, shop size or by any geography, such as county, postcode, catchments area or sales territory
- Develop Sales territories
- Locating Optimal position of a new outlet
- Optimal routing of Petroleum tankers across the country and across the city.
- Crisis management
- Volume distribution of petroleum products
- Geographic analysis of distribution pattern.
- Finding a specific outlet in a city and deriving
a route to go there.
GIS use in the petroleum industry – as we see today
Petroleum companies have traditionally invested quite readily in information technology (IT) over the years, throughout many portions of their business operations. In the past five years a significant proportion of that investment has been directed at the "spatial data component," such that at the present day some of the larger independent and National Oil Companies (NOC) are the leading exponents of "spatial data management" and the effective use of GIS.
This development is perhaps inevitable, due to the relatively high investment by these companies in their IT infrastructures and the very significant reliance that their business processes have on those spatial data. Virtually all petroleum business operations, from regional geologic exploration, through field appraisal and development, and from product distribution, facilities management and environmental modeling, to retailing or commercial and domestic supply, rely on fundamental spatial data components, mapped in the context of these employed systems, into "spatial business objects."
This is true for many other industries but the petroleum companies have been (comparatively) expeditious in the employment of appropriate GIS technologies to effectively manage these data and use them to better understand and plan their critical business processes.
As of today, most major petroleum organizations are involved in varying programs of data consolidation, compression and conversion, in order to more cost effectively and efficiently manage their integrated information archives.
GIS companies and solutions for Petroleum Industry
The integration of GIS into the current business model of petroleum industry is not an easy process, and requires through understanding of the detail requirements and practices of the Petroleum companies. Seeing a positive sign of growth and advancement of GIS in this sector major GIS companies and their partners have started to capitalize this multi billion dollar industry.
All major GIS companies have been instrumental in evolving new solutions for the petroleum industry for the last 3 decades. User Groups, GIS consultants, Oil service companies, Petroleum Engineers, GIS data providers, Hardware suppliers and Software suppliers all add up to growth and development enabling innovative solutions and analytical processes for the industry.
There is a sharp increase in offering a special petroleum application package and analysis component that can be added to the core GIS product. Especially partners of all the major GIS companies are offering customized solution on the base product.
Some of the GIS solutions currently offered by various vendors and their partners are:
- Corporate GIS data management
- Map production and presentation
- Digital Elevation Models and hydrology
- Environmental sensitivity analysis and modeling
- Pipeline route optimization and pipeline leakage risk
- Internet mapping and image web server solutions
- Workflow analysis
- Crisis Management on the Internet
- GDA 94 and datum conversion
- Conversion of current environmental data to GIS format
- Linkage of oil spill model to GIS.
- Retail market analysis.
- Distribution analysis.
- Market pattern analysis by demographics.
- Retail outlet supply routing and many more…
Future Expectations
Although GIS technology brings lots of benefits to the oil industry already, it can still be made better. Where requested improvements can be stated and implemented in a generic way, they can benefit all users of GIS. Some things on "oil industry wish list" include:
- Geologic Evaluation
- Reservoir Analysis
- Seismic Acquisition (access of seismic data and well logs)
- Land / Lease Management
- Drilling Activity Analysis
- Competitor Analysis
- Mergers and Acquisitions
- Gas Marketing
- Improved integration with our relational databases.
- A truly global paradigm, where locations on the earth include "metadata" like Geodetic datum, Cartesian projection/spheroid parameters, etc.
- Improved "Conflation" tools. "Conflation" is the process of merging two or more GIS datasets, so that the output has the highest-accuracy data from all the inputs. As surveying tools and GIS data from satellite and ortho-photo images continues to improve, existing maps and GIS datasets must be "high-graded", i.e. adjusted to remain consistent with the newer data. Managing this process may well be the biggest challenge.
- 3-dimensional GIS: Right now, use of GIS stops at the Earth's surface. To visualize subsurface reservoirs, we must change to completely different systems, which rarely present a "seamless" interface to the GIS.
- Advanced analytical tools for Retail outlet management.
- Integration of Mobile GIS services helping in
optimized business solutions etc
Summary - GIS technology to bring benefits to the Petroleum Industry
GIS technology and related hardware and software have advanced to the stage where they offer tangible technical and economic benefits to the petroleum industry. Not only do they improve current business processes by furthering better data sharing and more accurate mapping, they also support efforts at "business process re-engineering", where technical professionals redefine their activities as they are able to access critical data in new ways.
Several GIS initiatives are well on the way to becoming production systems integrated into the business processes, with support groups and an increasing number of end-users who continue to discover new ways of benefiting from this technology.
The road ahead promises tough competition, technical advancements in software and hardware utilization and integration, adapting to multi discipline requirements, improving the system architecture from discrete model to a universal model, advanced data acquisition methods and so on. The component of “Where” can make a real good impact in the Petroleum Industry in the way they do business and serve the customers.
Acknowledgement
I acknowledge the support and encouragement of Mr. U.Srinivas, Dr. Nagesh and Mr Ashish Gupta of InfoTech Enterprises Ltd..
Reference
- Enterprise wide GIS by Kirk A. Barrell.
- Web site information from ESRI, MapInfo, Petrolynx, Catalist etc.