Reference Material

inheritance helps find information

How can inheritance help you find information?

For over twenty years, Flare has been helping clients improve their search experience with a single search over multiple technical repositories.

One of the key concepts that helps support improved search is the ability for information to inherit context depending on where it is being stored, or where in a structure it has been placed.  This reduces the burden on users to add tags to enable future information discovery.

The Flare IM tools makes it possible to define inherited tags based on the source of the information, or inherit tags based on the file structure or process being run, e.g., a SharePoint site might drive confidentiality settings, the position in a file hierarchy might define the country the content is about or the user community that the content is relevant to.

Combine the idea of inheriting tags with a semantic search and taxonomies to really add power to your search.

Do you wish you could find your hardcopy data?

Do you wish you could find your hardcopy data?

If you have spent more than a few years working in the oil and energy sector, you will know that with each cyclical dip in the price of oil comes a spate of corporate acquisitions, mergers and takeovers.

Combine this with the scores of license rounds and farm-in opportunities in which your company may have participated over the decades, and its little wonder that your legacy data stores can become difficult to navigate.

This is particularly true for hardcopy data. Almost all majors and supermajors have reams of paper wellfiles, seismic sections and basemaps that they have acquired over the years, often accessible only as library listings.

Flare Solutions specialize in the surfacing of lost data. Supported by the very latest in cognitive search technology, our career data managers are on hand to find, organize, spatialize and digitize your legacy well and seismic data, no matter how big the challenge.

If you would like to know exactly what data your company has access to, give us a call.

#Informationmanagement

Making the most of your Data Room

Making the most of your Data Room

Farm-in opportunities and license rounds often result in large volumes of poorly organised information requiring analysis and interpretation  within strictly limited timeframes. Without sufficient support, your subsurface team members may find themselves spending more time searching for information than interpreting it.

With Flare’s innovative suite of information management tools, we are on-hand to take the pressure off your support staff and geoscientists when in receipt of data room information. Our Graph-based technology and ML-driven document recognition systems allow us to process large volumes of data and information very quickly, delivering fully catalogued datasets and enriched, descriptive metadata, all accessible via a set of  easy-to-use search tools.

If you would like to see a demo of our Sirus IM suite in action, feel free to give us a call.

Making your Data & Information Work for you during a Decommissioning Program

Making your Data & Information Work for you during a Decommissioning Program

Data and information are key components to any decommissioning activity. Without the correct data and information, the risks (HSE, budget, time, compliance) associated with these activities increase massively and making the correct decisions is often difficult.

As such, early preparation, QC and access to data and information is imperative. Flare can help with this by providing:

Easy to use search tools for locating data and information
Tagging of information to improve search results
Tracking of data deliverables and regulatory compliance

graph database technology

New Graph Engine

Flare’s information management applications now have graph database technology as their engine.

Graph databases store information as nodes along with the relationships that connect them. Organisations have large volumes of technical information so the number of nodes can be enormous and the number of relationships can be orders of magnitude greater still.

But, once the graph is in place, the speed to return searches can be truly astonishing. And as the volume of information added to the graph increases, the speed remains the same.

Should you buy or build your taxonomy

Should you buy or build your taxonomy?

A taxonomy is a hierarchical list used for classifying things, such as documents and other content and will ensure that they are easier to find and retrieve. Building a taxonomy will ensure that it fits your very specific needs, but it will take a great deal of time, skill, knowledge and budget, any of which could be in short supply. Buying an industry-specific taxonomy will give you immediate benefit and will remove the pain of creating one yourself. It will also be interoperable with other organisations that you may deal with.

Flare’s approach allows you to embed a sophisticated, off-the-shelf taxonomy, and combine it with custom classes to meet any specific needs. Flare also offers a service to manage your taxonomies, to keep it up to date with industry and technology trends.

Folio Search Performance

Folio Search Performance

Flare’s Folio provides a project view over multiple applications and multiple repositories. It enhances network drives, delivering hierarchical views, document counts and rapid search capabilities in one view.

One of the largest client datasets exceeds 300 million items. Folio returns search results in less than a second and presents the results on a customisable view.

Search through millions of items with ultra-quick response times

Search results can be highlighted within existing data structures

Both folders and files can be searched, displayed and interrogated.

content migration

Need to migrate from content store to SharePoint?

Flare has helped many of its clients migrate millions of documents from on-premise electronic document management systems and file shares to SharePoint Online. Flare’s SharePoint adapter moves the content and adds the metadata you need without any impact on day-to-day operations. If you have a content migration challenge, get in touch to see if Flare can help.

Flare extends energy taxonomies for the Energy Transition.

Flare extends energy taxonomies for the Energy Transition.

Flare has extended its energy taxonomy to cover renewable energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal. This includes products and terms to support areas such as energy transition to net zero, CCUS, regulation and licencing, energy markets and economics, generation equipment, distributed generation and microgrids.

In common with the rest of the Flare taxonomy all terms have hierarchical and other inter-term relationships as well as rich synonyms and examples. This enables accurate and relevant searching across your own and external sources as well as supporting your information and data interpretation and analytics.

#InformationManagement
#DigitalTransformation

Benefit from the same approach to managing information and be able to deploy this easily using Sirus.

IM Solutions: Can one size really fit all?

In Flare’s early days we were fortunate enough to land a software deal with a large energy company.  The deal was to provide our IM solutions to the entire company under a global license deal.  But would the same solution work for smaller companies?due to reduced global demand. The downturn in the industry has led to energy companies reacting by cutting costs, reducing staff, shelving projects, and delaying exploration and development decisions. Because data and information drives everything we do in the industry, including business decisions at all levels, it is important companies continue to invest and look after their data and information assets. Information and data content should be a clear competitive differentiator for energy companies.

Information and data management in the downturn

Information and data management in the downturn

2020 was a very difficult year for individuals and companies around the world. Covid-19 has affected all aspects of our lives and has impacted the energy sector in a number of ways, most noticeably in falling energy prices
due to reduced global demand. The downturn in the industry has led to energy companies reacting by cutting costs, reducing staff, shelving projects, and delaying exploration and development decisions. Because data and information drives everything we do in the industry, including business decisions at all levels, it is important companies continue to invest and look after their data and information assets. Information and data content should be a clear competitive differentiator for energy companies.

We’ve recently added a download to the website that looks at how energy companies need to react to the downturn and plan for the upturn.

Flare oil gas authority

Flare awarded data services contract with the Oil & Gas Authority

Flare Solutions is delighted to announce that the OGA (Oil & Gas Authority) in the UK has selected Flare to help improve the completeness and quality of data held by the OGA. The OGA’s aim is to ensure that it can supply better datasets to the industry and other stakeholders in order to promote its objectives of Maximising Economic Recovery and Energy Transition.

#InformationManagement
#EnergyTransition

digital exploration manager

Establishing an Exploration Project Interpretation Environment?

As every technical assistant knows, one of the first requests that an exploration manager will make when starting up a new project is to establish the digital interpretation environment.  This inevitably means trawling the company’s operational and legacy repositories to find whatever structured or unstructured information the company may own over the proposed AOI.

Often, it is building the unstructured dataset that will produce the greatest challenge. In a bid to find all salient reports and archived projects, support staff typically find themselves tackling everything from snapshots of poorly managed legacy shared-drives to multi-format library indexes of decades-old hardcopy stores.

With Flare technology, this process can be dramatically streamlined.

Click to find out more.

Seasons Greetings from Flare Solutions

Seasons greetings to clients and friends

We’ve heard the word ‘unprecedented’ so many times this year, and we recognise that it has been a tough time in the Energy industry for companies as they face new challenges, and for individuals with uncertain futures.

However, as we head towards Christmas, we’d like to take this opportunity to wish all of our clients and friends a peaceful and happy holiday season. And, of course, we’ll raise a glass to a happy and brighter New Year.

And for those of you that fret about needles falling from your Christmas Tree throughout the festive season, why not pop over to our website, and download your Needle-Free Christmas tree model.

Regulatory Reporting

Do you need to manage regulatory reporting?

Do you need to manage regulatory reporting?

Organisations often have to manage hundreds of daily, weekly, monthly or annual regulatory or partner reports across many business areas.

Flare has combined their document classification and process tracking systems to create a cross-organisational system that:

Facilitates the capture and classification/tagging of key ‘regular’ reports
Assigns reporting responsibilities and manages access control
Provides reminders of upcoming or missed reporting deadlines
Creates management metrics to drive reporting performance improvement
Routes documents to appropriate stores based on business rules

And links to all of the reports are added to Flare’s Sirus Enterprise information system, so they are easy to find.

#informationmanagement
#regulatoryreporting
#FlareSirus

Information Management Clean Up Services

With over twenty years of continuous development, Flare’s Sirus information management suite now forms the foundation of our IM clean-up services.

We’ve combined industry best-practice in the capture and quality improvement of very large datasets with the speed and scalability of Graph technology, AI-driven metadata enrichment, and the most comprehensive Energy taxonomy available on today’s market.

The end result: whether your information is stored on hard media, live shared-drives or document management systems, we can gather, merge, and process it faster, and with greater accuracy, than ever before.

#informationmanagement
#artificialintelligence
#FlareSirus

Information Management Governance

The Importance of Information Management Governance

Organisations have long pushed Information Governance as a focus of their activities. Its key elements of Sponsorship, Standards, People & Organisation, Controls, Technology and Processes provide a framework for all other related data and information management activities.

However, we still find that some companies don’t embrace IM Governance and as such they sometimes lack a coordinated and sustainable approach to IM. Flare has designed a number of governance frameworks for our clients and we’ve collated our methodology into a short paper.

Power of Sirus and Office 365

Flare puts the power of Sirus into Office 365

Flare’s new assistant Ava is now available in O365 applications to help users with suggestions for tags, standard names or values from business glossaries and dictionaties.

So, if you’ve ever struggled to remember the official company name, project, reference code or just want to know what tags to add to a document to make it easier to find Ava can help. 

Ava sits right alongside Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint and can also help in SharePoint.

#DigitalTransformation
#InformationManagement
#FlareSirus

Digital clean up

Do you wish you had sparkling clean information and data?

The phrase “rubbish in – rubbish out” has never been so relevant. 

It is not surprising that you struggle to find the information you need if it has not been stored with meaningful, consistent tags.

And now, as we try to get machines to do automatic tagging using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, it is critical that we train these new applications well with clean input content or they will tag badly too.

Flare has a range of tools to help; to help you make sense of your input information, even on a messy shared drive, to help you give it consistent tags, to help you find it again.  And to keep it polished if things change.

#informationmanagement
#artificialintelligence
#FlareSirus

Is your IT/IM architecture too expensive?

Is your IT/IM architecture too expensive?

One client had over 300,000,000 documents indexed on one server

That’s not a typo.  We’ve been working with a client in the midst of M&A activity, who had to deal with a massive influx of content.

Using Flare’s tools allowed us to index the entire dataset on one server.

If you’d like to save money on infrastructure, contact us to find out more.

Does a merger or acquisition threaten to overwhelm your organisation with torrents of documents and data?

Find out how Flare Solutions’ approach saved Total Upstream Denmark millions of euros in the first eighteen months.

Olivier Mairal, Head of Data Integration at Total, said “…from experience, a standard approach on a similar scope would have taken about 20 years to do this manually with one-person EFT and a significant saving in terms of budget. The transition project was a success and delivered on time. My team did a great job, and Flare Solutions’ consultants and tools were also solid contributors to this success”.

#informationmanagement
#mergersandacquisitions
#total

https://www.flare-solutions.com/news/ma-activity-integrating-datasets-cohesive-usable-dataset/?utm_source=PR20201014&utm_campaign=LI

Can your users tag content consistently?

For over twenty years, Flare has been helping clients improve enterprise search.

Whilst is it possible to tag content automatically, we also support users with a unique and simple interface to interact with content, to select recommended tags and standard naming conventions.

If you want to integrate this capability with SharePoint, file systems and other repositories, please get in touch.

#informationmanagement
#artificalintelligence
#FlareSirus

Flare’s taxonomies keep evolving

Flare’s Taxonomies undergo continuous improvement, refinement and additions as new business areas, concepts and processes are required.

If you’d like to know how Taxonomies can save you time and money on Search and Integration projects or you’d rather benefit from Taxonomies than develop them, Flare can help.
#informationmanagement