I once attended a Bible study, which focused on the book of Genesis. The teacher asked: “What is the most important piece of jigsaw puzzle?”  Students started to answer “The corner ones”, “One with straight edge”. After a pause, he slowly revealed “The most important piece of jigsaw is the box top.” We all smiled when he showed us a slide of a box of puzzle with puzzle image.

He further explained that the book of Genesis is the box top of the Bible. “Genesis maps out all the happenings of the entire Bible.” He said.

Many of us played with puzzles ourselves or with our children. The finished artwork bears no resemblance to the hundreds of pieces of colored cardboards in the box that initially greeted us. Although the individual elements remain the same, and do not reveal much information, the complete work allows us to see the whole picture.

In a similar manner, drilling engineers are constantly putting together the pieces of procedure, equipment, instrument readings from rig floor, and their own calculations. Our job is to fit them into the right places. This way, we can understand why certain drilling parameters change, why problems occur or what our observation mean.

The beauty of drilling software such as TADPRO (torque and drag) is its ability to put pieces of information including ROP, RPM and WOB all together to solve the puzzle. The integration of operation parameters, wellbore trajectory and advanced mathematics model produces more meaningful results.  Think of TADPRO as your box top!