The Times They Are A-Changin'

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Freddie Ruiz, PVI

In 1964 Bob Dylan said:

The order is rapidly fadin'

and the first one now will later be last

for the times they are a-changin'.

Those words are more real today than ever before. Viewing it from a technological perspective there’s no doubt in everyone’s mind how the modern world has evolved. The oil and gas industry as a whole is in an accelerated and continuous state of change due to a combination of engineering, technology and innovation. This change has left no part of the industry untouched.

For instance before, mud engineers most likely did not have time to enjoy a good cup of coffee in the morning when making a mud report due to the amount of time they had to put into it to have it ready on time. As technology advances the story about the cup of coffee is a lot different. Thanks to technology mud engineers now with the help of software can make mud reports in less time and enjoy their coffee while the software does the work.

Change equals progress and progress equals success and that’s the case of our drilling mud reporting software, MUDPRO.

MUDPRO - drilling mud reporting

From its first version to its latest, MUDPRO has come a long way and it is without a doubt one of our most popular software. Even from its first release in 2011, MUDPRO proved to be a great tool for mud engineers. The program allows you to generate daily mud reports, save all data in your computer for further reviews, and manage inventory and cost. MUDPRO also allows you to easily import and export well data, do a recap report in seconds, and perform engineering calculations among many other features. However the way MUDPRO has evolved is proof that here at PVI we are updated with the latest trends. Our priority is to keep our customers satisfied and to make their work load lighter. With software like MUDPRO, mud engineers can become multitasking experts.

Having said all of that, as the industry changes so must the people related to it. In order to thrive in these times, the companies in the oil and gas industry have to be ready for whatever changes and challenges lie ahead. It’s time to keep evolving, because the times they are a-changin’.

Mud Reporting: A Piece of Cake

Posted on May 20, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

Daily tasks can become heavy burdens if we do not use proper tools. These burdens cause us more stress and cost more time. Time is money, but even money cannot buy us time. On the other hand, if we are equipped with the right tools, our productivity increases. We can be happier and capable of controlling what we do.

For mud engineers, daily life starts with the preparation of mud reports in the early morning. In the old days, mud engineers used paper forms to record mud properties, usages and costs. Nowadays, most mud engineers use Excel spreadsheets or computer software like MUDPRO (drilling mud reporting) to do the same jobs. Software has become our most essential weapon to fight the daily battle of mud reporting.

But, not all weapons are created equal. Excel, while serving the purpose of electronically filing mud data, has limitations on keeping track of costs and mud volumes, because the start of each day of drilling is the continuation of the last day of drilling: we need to calculate the accumulative cost and the current inventory of chemicals. Once the drilling is done, mud engineers are required to generate end-of-well reports. At this stage, Excel’s limitations become more obvious. As the number of wells being drilled increase, the difficulties of using Excel arise exponentially.

A better approach is to use a software like MUDPRO, with a back bone of database to record and more importantly, to manage the data. Yes, it is a new piece of software we need to get familiar with, but once you use it for a few days, it can become a habit and a routine; a good one you want to keep. No matter how many days the drilling phase may take, MUDPRO keeps all the history in its database. So, daily efforts of mud reporting are almost the same and at the end of the drilling process, you can just click a couple of buttons to generate the end-of-well recaps.

If we compare the efforts in the overall performance of using Excel and mud reporting software like MUDPRO VS drilling days, we can see the divergence between the two lines.

Reporting Efforts vs Drilling Days

Managing our time is managing our lives. Using the right software saves us time and enhances our lives. MUDPRO makes mud reporting a piece of cake, which you can enjoy with a cup of morning coffee.

As Smooth As A Cruise

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Gefei Liu, PVI

“For the next four days and nights, you do not need to worry about making meals, washing dishes, finding restaurants or driving around. You are on vacation!” The host of the first night show in the Disney Wonder Cruise ship disclaimed, while everyone in the audience including me bursted into cheers.

With the exception of those of us who are obsessed with cooking and do not want to take breaks from our daily routines, most people love cruise vacations because they free us from those tedious work and bring us to remote places.

Smooth cruises are as fascinating as exotic destinations. Vacationers are looking for fun, excitement, stimulation and pleasant surprises. The expectations of 2,680 passengers are met by 1,000 crew members. On Average, every 3 guests are served by more than 1 crew member. No wonder I felt the impeccable quality of services.

British writer Arthur C. Clarke made Clarke’s Three Laws. The last one of them is: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” My experience aboard the Disney Wonder Cruise reminded me of our drilling software and consulting services we provide to the drilling community.

On the service side, we do drilling engineering consulting to companies or individuals. It is normally one-to-one. Our drilling software, on the other hand, is often one-to-many. We develop a particular solution, such as MUDPRO (drilling mud reporting software), and provide it to mud engineers all over the world.

We also realize that many drilling fluid engineers actually make some mud reporting software using Excel spreadsheets to replace paper forms. These spreadsheets might serve the purpose of reporting to some degree. However, keeping track of numerous daily reports in terms of spreadsheets and creating end-of-well recaps are challenging, to say the least.

As a drilling software company, we always want to streamline the daily calculations such as mud reporting. MUDPRO is the solution to remove some of the burdens that mud engineers have to carry every morning and at the completion of drilling.

Like a cruise ship, MUDPRO is created by a team of petroleum engineers, graphical interface designers, programmers and software testers (quality controllers). Quite a few companies think that we have only a couple of genius developing MUDPRO. Far from that, we not only have a group of people involved, but also have spent a few years to arrive at our current level of comprehensiveness of mud reporting.

As software developers, we know that many engineers can program. It is our feeling that unless you love to code, you should leave that dirty and tedious job to some dedicated professionals like the folks at PVI, because we have an experienced team whose mission and passion are software creation.

Cooking meals, or washing dishes in a cruise ship? I don’t think so. Developing drilling software while drilling a well? That is the reason I recommend PVI drilling software for your next drilling project. This way you can be on cruise control; as smooth as the cruise journey I am taking. Safe travels.

Saving Time Using Drilling Software

Posted on December 24, 2013 by Gefei Liu, PVI

Who doesn’t like savings, deals, bargains and even some free stuff every now and then? Further, who does not want to save time in our work? Generally speaking, software save us tremendous amount of time in our daily lives. We heavily rely on Outlook^® for our email communication, Microsoft Word^® for word processing. These software free us from repeated and often tedious tasks. And they are so common in our work places that we often take them for granted.

While we use these software as tools for our work, they are the missions of many software developers, whose full time jobs are to created them. In this society, everyone serves someone else.

Specifically, drilling engineering software has become an indispensable tool for well planning, especially for horizontal and extend reach well drilling. Being a software developer, I feel very lucky to be involved in this highly creative work, which requires both engineering background and graphic design senses.

Our goal is to create drilling software not only to solve technical problems, but also improve drilling efficiency by solving problems quickly. This means carefully designed user-interfaces so that the users will be able to save trouble and time to perform a certain task.

Time belongs to everyone. Wasting other people’s time is a crime. On the other side, saving people’s time brings benefit to them.

Our way of saving people’s time is to make software extremely easy to use.

We as software developers do not meet with our users often, but our users frequently use our software and some even do on a daily basis. For example, there are more than 500 MUDPRO (drilling mud reporting) users in US. Every morning, these mud engineers open up MUDPRO, input wellbore configuration, mud properties, inventory and type remarks. Then they will generate daily report from MUDPRO Output window. If we can add features to save one user 5 minutes in the process, we will be able to save 5(min) x 500(user) x 365(day)= 912500(min) = 15208(hr) = 634(day) of time of those 500 MUDPRO users in a period of one year. This is as powerful as the butterfly effect. The flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas. If we make an improvements in our software, hundreds and thousands of software users will benefit, even it means that sometimes we need to spend months for certain feature. But it is worth the efforts. Spending time in software development translate into tremendous time saving for all software users. The benefit is amplified much greatly as more users join the pool.

Happy running software and saving time!

I Never Felt So Good When Taking Off My Shoes

Posted on December 10, 2013 by Gefei Liu, PVI

During Thanksgiving weekend, our company staff and families went to Lake Tahoe to have a retreat. Skiing was one of the activities. Quite a few of us were first time skiers. Here are some of our children expressing their experience on wearing the ski boots.

Rachel: "I felt short when taking off the shoes."

Nathan: "I never felt so good when taking off my shoes."

Nowadays, almost all our activities are enriched with high-tech equipment. Skiing is no exception. A pair of ski boots can easily weight a few pounds. Walking with them is no fun. But once the shoes are attached to ski and ski is on the slope of snow, they make us run faster on snow than on road. Technology makes wonders. Besides specific skills and physical training, more sportsmen rely heavily on gears to enhance their performance. To swimmers, it is swimming suit; to tennis players, it is racket and strings and also as the running shoes to runners. The pairs can go on.

These enabling technologies also play big role in our drilling industry, making drilling operations more cost effective and safe. Among them is drilling engineering software. Even though the drilling software does not weight as much as ski boots, it carries the significant results of research and engineering in the areas of pipe mechanics, hydraulics, casing wear, etc.

One might think the drilling software as one more package to install in computer, one more burden to carry. However, the benefits of running drilling software far out weight the cost or trouble of using it.

Download and installation of our MUDPRO (mud reporting software) may take 15 minutes. Once mud engineers start to use MUDPRO, they could easily save hours of work every day, not to mention the much better quality of report and end-of-well recap.

Sometimes, a little bit trouble, such as wearing heavy ski boots, brings tremendous convenience; sometimes, a little bit spending is rewarded with big saving.

Just as Nathan described his feeling on ski boots, our MUDPRO user might say: "I never felt so relieved when making daily mud report."

An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Gefei Liu, PVI

Recently, I had the pleasure of shopping in a well-established furniture store. The show room is huge with 2-stories of display space. The way they arranged sofas, tables and dimmed lights all created cozy environment. I bought a few items. The salesman made an extra effort by showing me the inventory and check-up places before delivery. The inventory occupies more space than show room. What impressed me the most is the spacious and well-lit check-up place. “We make sure all our furniture are in perfect condition before they leave our store.” That was the moment I felt I was taken care of. Then, I noticed a slogan in the delivery room as shown below:

This triggered me to give a presentation to our development team and write this article.

We develop drilling software. When we demonstrate software, we spare no efforts to show the best sides of models, just as furniture stores create beautiful setting to display them. Before releasing the software, we often go to extreme to debug the code. This is similar to furniture stores’ effort to ensure the quality of goods, only that our products are sometimes used by hundreds of people. Take the example of our MUDPRO (drilling mud reporting software), we have about 500+ active users. If we can fix one bug in MUDPRO, we will eliminate 500+ complaints, replies and would-be frustration from users. This is power of lever: 1 hour of careful coding and testing from our side leads to 100+ hours of saving on both our developers and customers.

As software developers, we do not face our end users very often; however, our products such as MUDPRO meet them every day. In a sense, we are the software we develop and we strive to create a better “we”.

A friend of mine, John, after hearing the story of the slogan in the store, told me: “It may be better expressed: ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’” His suggestion became the title of this article. Thank you, John!

Mud Reporting: ¥es, $ure!

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Gefei Liu, PVI

Dubai has many unique scenes, among which is advertising. This is the picture I took in the Dubai International Airport. It shows the flexibility of a Chinese bank, which can conduct business transactions in both ¥ (Chinese currency) and US dollar.

Good advertising shares the following traits:

No need to explain
No need to think
Make viewers smile and remember

The “¥es and $ure” is short and accurate enough to leave a long lasting impression in my mind.

The ad reminds me of our MUDPRO (drilling mud reporting) software. Being drilling fluid reporting software, it keeps tracking mud additives inventory, cost and hydraulics and generates daily report. Once drilling is done, MUDPRO can generate end-of-well recap, which contains the history and total cost. One of the unique features of MUDPRO is that users can select different currencies, including ¥ and $.

¥es, $ure of MUDPRO

From coding point of view, having a system of different currencies is not hard. The difficult part is to be considerate for users in the different parts of the world, even at small element like currency symbol.

What Is Common between Elevator and Drilling Software?

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Gefei Liu, PVI

Creativity, life or business each has its up and down, like an elevator. This article was triggered by an elevator in a hotel I stayed in Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq. I spent one week there providing cementing software training to a fast-growing service company in the region.

One time I stepped into the elevator and accidently pressed ④. The button ④ lit up. My room was at level 5. Realizing the mistake, I pressed ⑤. Then, just out of curiosity, I pressed ④ again. To my pleasant surprise, the light on ④ was turned off. You know what? The elevator did not stop at level 4.

Here are the 2 pictures I took later to reproduce the steps.

My past experience told me that if I press wrong buttons, I have to forgive myself, either patiently wait for the unscheduled stop or let the elevator stop at untended level after I leave.

This new experience let me wonder why they design their elevators differently. There must be reasons behind the design of elevator control panel. As a software developer, I find this new way of design the most natural. Because round buttons representing the hotel floors are actually check boxes: riders can change mind to go to room first instead of heading to gym. Plus, adding this “Cancelling” or “Checking off” feature does not affect other normal selections.

During software development process, developers use many controls in the graphical user interface (GUI). Among those controls, a radio button or an option button (⊙) is a type of element that allows the user to choose only one of a predefined set of options. On the other hand, a check box (☑)permits the user to make multiple selections from a number of options or to have the user answer yes (checked) or no (not checked) on a simple yes/no question.

In our drilling software such as MUDPRO(drilling mud reporting), we use these controls extensively. For example, in generating daily mud report, we provide checkboxes and options, allowing mud engineers to tailor the contents and style of the report.

Checkboxes and options in MUDPRO Daily Report

Problem of programming a bank of elevators is often used as exercise for students majoring in computer science. The software program is to control the actions of each elevator, based on the information of the state of each button on the floors and inside the elevators, as well as the time elapsed since each floor-button is pushed. Drilling software provides technical solutions to the engineering problems in drilling operations, based on the operation parameters. The commonality of any programming tasks is to test the functionality and usability from a user’s prospective. This process requires constant exchange, back and forth between developers and users. This is also one of the reasons why upgraded versions are necessary. Software is not only a product, but also a process of improvements. This new control panel in the elevator might be an upgraded version.

MUDPRO, when generating the end-of-well recap, memorizes the users’ setting such as shown in the following graph, so the user can generate recap in the same style.

MUDPRO report memorizes users settings

Our office is in a 5-story building. I take elevator at least twice a day. In the future, there might be elevators that can recognize the frequent-rider like me through eye recognition and automatically memorize where I am going. Of course, it will allow me to cancel my selection and visit my travel agent on the 3rd floor.

I am still dreaming… Elevator chime sounds. My floor is here and I got to go. Have a good day and I see you next time.

A Little of Everything

Posted on February 19, 2013 by PVI

The Orange Show is one man’s vision of what a monument to the orange would look like. All of it is hand-built and adorned with what most people consider trash. It looks like a house and functions like a house but it is a piece of art, and a thought-provoking reminder of what one person can do when they set their mind to something.

For one dollar, you can see…

Metal wheel rims from bicycles, wagons and old tractors are featured everywhere. They line the balconies and stairwells. They float in the air on the roof. They are multi-colored and of all different sizes. And don’t forget seats – rows of tractor seats – to sit in. And a wishing well so that you can get your wishes fulfilled too. Everywhere you look there are quirky signs, statutes and intricate tile work that includes colored glass and bottle caps.

The intricacies and details of the Orange Show reveal a lot about the character of the man who built it. A plaque inside tells the story of two frogs that fall into a butter churn. They can’t get out. One gives up and drowns. The other one kicks and kicks until the liquid around him turns into solid butter and he climbs out.

Twenty-five years of persistence by mailman, Jeff McKissack (1902-1980), to build the 3,000 square foot Orange Show is pretty amazing in itself. But when you consider he did all the intricate ironwork and tile work himself, you can see that sometimes there’s more to people (and things) than meets the eye.

Most of the Orange Show’s display is on the outside of the house. McKissack made ample use of the roof space and courtyard for most of his display. It is definitely an outside show. Anyone passing by will see it. It is impossible to miss. It was his bigger than life tribute to the humble orange.

It is also a testament to what one person can do when given enough time and no money to do it. Drilling software was like that for many years. Engineers who needed information simply had to find a way to get what they needed with no time or money to develop it. Today engineers have PVI’s MUDPRO software – a comprehensive mud reporting and data management system. It takes all the broken glass and used bottle caps of mud drilling and pours it into a database capable of handling daily well reporting data, engineering calculations, mud mixtures, operational functions, cost graphs, end-of-well recaps and more.

It literally is a little of everything all in one place.

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Visit The Orange Show at:
2401 Munger Street, Houston, Texas, USA
Phone: 713-926-6368
Directions: I-45 South, exit Telephone Road, bear to the far right, turn right on Munger Street (just before Telephone Road). The Orange Show is on the left.

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