What’s Better in 6

Our clients that use Value Navigator for budgeting or A&D will now have more than just three reserves statuses. We are introducing “Plans” that allow many more copies of the data to allow for versioning and what-if scenarios. Data entry is minimized by allowing a plan to reference an existing one, and we have kept the Reserves Working-Pending-Accepted statuses as a secure and strictly defined workflow.

Compare a selection of results in the Comparison tabs. These tabs are based on economic results sets and can compare production, costs, and cash flow. The Comparison tabs consist of summary compare graphs and grids. These allow users to select and view multiple wells, groups, and folders. Display Options selections are also displayed in the grid.

After a short absence from Value Navigator, CBM Volumetrics has returned to the Predictions | Volumetrics tab. The addition of the calculations for Volumetrics on Coalbed methane reservoirs further advances our goal of supporting unconventional workflows. CBM Volumetrics will be released in this Fall's Value Navigator 6.2 release.

Value Navigator can now import files from Fekete Harmony. Using File > Import in Value Navigator, import gas and oil decline analyses to a reserves category, including information about the forecast in a custom field created especially for this. Includes both single- and multi-segment decline (with a limiting Df) analyses. Fekete Harmony exports an .xml file which can be imported into Value Navigator. Import privileges are required in Value Navigator.

These are great time-saving keyboard shortcuts that work very well in smaller Value Navigator databases.

Here is the trick! If you want to quickly expand all the folders in your ValNav hierarchy, rest at the company level folder and press the * key on your keyboard (use the one on your number pad, not Shift+8). Voila! All your folders expand!

To make them collapse, press the - button on the number pad.

Reports tab enhancement: the scenario selector. Configure your scenarios in the Batch Manager and run them on the selected well(s) in the Reports tab without returning to the Batch Manager: it’s easy access to a very powerful tool! (Note that you can also now enter the Scenarios editor from the Reports tab by clicking the browse button beside the Scenario dropdown).

Enables users to calculate the Economic Limit at the field level. Fields contain many wells and facilities, and some facilities are a common cost for all the wells. In some cases, if a single well had to carry the entire facility cost it would be uneconomic, but allowing several wells to produce collectively could pay for the facility costs. CTD will allow clients to ignore well level economic limits and run all the wells and facilities together as a whole. Only when the entire field is uneconomic will they then abandon it, thus a Common Termination Date. This is especially useful when looking at fields with really high facility or abandonment costs like an offshore platform, or SAGD operation.

Allows users to import daily data for various purposes in a project. This may be used in the initial months of production, where daily results are often enough to determine the future production profile. Daily data is also used to supplement monthly data to keep production results up to date.

It’s now even easier to recalculate an entire group, or even all groups in a folder or database. Choose between current reserves category or all reserves categories with forecasts to recalculate production history, forecast, volumetrics, P/Z and GCI depth.

You can choose to recalculate just the production history, if you remove or add a well to a group. Or you can recalculate the group’s history and forecast.

For groups that have a decline that was created at the group level, there is a choice to either skip these groups and leave the decline parameters intact, or recalculate them based on their children’s forecasts.  Groups that have a manually entered forecast at the group level will always be recalculated. Child groups can be recalculated, too.

• Use more than one type well

• Use multiple rigs and link dates

• Adjust COO/COS, Production and Capital

• Common on-production date

• Graphs of Production and Capital

• Daily granularity for schedule

Type wells in 6.0 are enhanced from 5.2 in order to improve the overall user experience.  There is so much new cool stuff we just say “Wow!” Users can analyze analogous well production, create a type profile for modelling new drills, and create new wells from the profile or apply the profile to existing wells. For further information, please see this Spotlight Feature Presentation.

Please reference this instructional powerpoint to help you get started.

We have improved our UWI validation and sorting by modifying the logic used to analyze and interpret UWIs. You should even notice an improvement over Value Navigator 5.2 in some cases, which may lead to some differences in the sort order if comparing results between the two versions.

Regular formatted expressions will now allow special characters as part of the extra text added at the end of a valid UWI. We have also removed the need to have a slash and event sequence at the end of the UWI. If the slash is missing, then it will be added to the UWI, and any remaining characters will be treated as extra text.

We have relaxed some of our restrictions so that we should now be able to interpret these types of names as valid UWIs.

As an example, the following formats will now be acceptable:

...02W4/0N/2 (Special characters at the end of the UWI will be treated as text.)

...02W4N/2 (The valid UWI will become ...02W4/N/2. A slash will always be added to our properly formatted string. Any remaining characters after the slash will be treated as text.)

...02W4 (The valid UWI will become ...02W4/)

...02W4321 (The valid UWI will become ...02W4/321, where the 321 is not actually an event sequence but will be treated as extra text after an empty event sequence.)

The improvements made to the Entity Locking function in version 6.0 mean that locks are now set in a way that minimizes restrictions on other users. Single entity locks are set by entering edit mode on an entity (instead of by resting on an entity, as in 5.2), and batch locks are set by starting a batch operation on entities selected in the hierarchy. This keeps all entities locked for the duration of the operation. Locks are cleared when changes to an entity have been saved, when the user moves off the entity, when the user exits the project, or when an administrator terminates a project connection.

We have re-added the ability to batch rename a list of entities. Use functions such as copy/cut/paste and the ability to import a .txt or .csv file to make your entity name updates more efficient. Note that items entered in the Old UWI column will be highlighted in red if they do not exist in the current database (they are printed in black text if they do exist).

We have improved the way ValNav 6.0 handles entity comments. The following are additions to the comments functionality:

1. They are more accessible now as they are located in a separate horizontal tab between the Review tab and the Map tab.
2. All comments for an entity are visible regardless of which reserves category they are booked against.
3. When viewing the Comments tab, columns of data are now configurable.
4. As part of our enhancements to security, a user can be assigned a policy that allows them to delete any entity comments in the database. Without this policy, users are only able to delete their own comments.

To make the process more efficient, we have recently added the ability to export a set of wells directly to a VNDB file (the file-based equivalent of the MS Access RDB file that you could create in Value Navigator 5.2) which can then be opened just like any other project file in ValNav 6.0. We know users frequently work in large, corporate databases, but prefer to do their evaluations and edits in a smaller, private version before committing the changes to the corporate database. Now it will require one less step to export to a personal project file. Note that you still must generate an XML file in order to import data into an existing database.

After our last Tech Preview release which featured reserves management, we have spent several development cycles further improving performance in the reserves management workflow. Performance gains in economics and better delta checking in batch operations will help streamline your reserves management workflow and the overall experience will be better.

If your company uses Windows Active Directory, you will now be able to configure Value Navigator 6.0 to work with it. This means that once you have logged onto your workstation, you would not need to log onto Value Navigator separately. When you click the Value Navigator icon, Windows will automatically tell Value Navigator who you are and log you in as the correct Value Navigator user with the correct permissions.

Sometimes an entity that is rolled up in a group can be quite elusive. Even though it is the group that counts toward your economics and your reserves, sometimes you just need to know where those individual wells went. To help with this, we’ve made two improvements.

First, all well groups are now easily expandable in the entity hierarchy, so you can view well information at the grouped entity level or the group level just by selecting the appropriate entity from the list. Second, when you do a find operation or run a filter, entities in groups will now be returned. Never lose those grouped entities again!

We have always had the best reserves management workflows in the industry, and with careful tweaking and fine-tuning we have made them even better in 6.0.

Finding which entities need to be balanced is easy: just run a tool and it will filter to all the entities that still need change records. And assigning a reserves type such as Shale Oil or Coal Bed Methane to your entity for reserves reporting is an easy-to-edit field in the entity’s properties.

• Create custom hierarchies and toggle between them from the Entity Explorer
• Hierarchies can be customized to an individual user

We’re building Value Navigator 6.0 to be the fastest solution on the market.

• Economic calculations are up to 15 times faster.
• Greatly improved Delta checking contributes to faster calculation and report generation times.