Wow, what a treat it was to be able to attend NAPE this year! This was actually my first in-person conference since the start of the pandemic. And while smaller than previous years, the energy – and business opportunities – were amazing! I simply loved seeing the big “SOLD” sign across maps as I walked the floor.

I spent most of my time in our booth, and when folks stopped, by my initial question to them was “got document problems”? And while channeling the “got milk” slogan is kind of cheesy – I know, excuse the dairy pun – it turns out there were quite a few document challenges out there!

One of the main themes that I heard was the pain surrounding mergers & acquisitions. Dealmaking was at an all-time high in the first half of 2021, and even though some of that urgency slowed in the second half of last year, it appears folks were still stinging from the pain of due diligence efforts or the aftermath of chaos that these deals left in their wake.

I heard things like:

• I have 15 file cabinets full of well logs. I think I need to keep them, but don’t know what is important in them.
• I have 89 boxes of “unknown documents” that came with the land. No idea what is in them.
• Each time we have a major acquisition, we inherit large sets of documents. Most of them are scanned, but we still don’t know what they are.
• We have many small volume acquisitions, each one of which adds new boxes of unknown documents to our pile.
• I have a land management system. My problem is getting the data into it.
• I’m tired of paying prime real estate square footage prices to store these boxes.
• I have thousands of boxes in storage – when I need something from one of them, it can take days to send someone to find what we need.

So, what does that all tell me? Even companies with relatively small volume problems are suffering big pain from the chaos of all of this unstructured data lying around.

I have to tell you – it was pretty gratifying that in our booth, I was able to give quick ad-hoc demos of how we are able to apply technology to address these pain points. At a high level, the technology I was showcasing features the ability to take a virtual “stack” of those unknown documents, automatically figure out what they are (classify them), and then based on that classification, extract the relevant information from them so that they can later be found with ease. 

The features that really seemed to resonate with attendees were:

• Support for a wide variety of documents with no consistent format? Check!
• Messy handwriting support? Check!
• What about this rig drawing, can you handle that? Check!
• Web-based access from anywhere? Check!
• Integration with existing asset management system? Does it have an API? Check!
• Priced to scale with consumption so that it is affordable for even a smaller operator? AND Check!

If we didn’t have a chance to meet at NAPE but some of these problems resonate with you, I’d still love to chat! Drop us a line and we will be in touch.