Oil production software built around the pumper's day
Six workflows, before and after
This is the whole argument for production monitoring software, stated as work that changes rather than features.
| Workflow | Without monitoring | With Heartland |
|---|---|---|
| Morning exception list | Pumper drives a fixed route, finds the down well at stop nine. | The down well is stop one, flagged at 3:40 a.m. when the current signature dropped. |
| Downtime attribution | Monthly volumes come in light; nobody can say which wells or why. | Every shut-in hour is tagged by cause — pump, power, facility, weather, market — and totaled in barrels. |
| Artificial lift optimization | Strokes per minute set at install and never revisited. | Fillage and load data drive SPM and cycle changes; pump-off events show up as a tunable, not a mystery. |
| Allocation & well tests | Tank gauges typed into a spreadsheet, tests months stale. | Level and run-ticket data reconcile against tests automatically; outliers get flagged, not buried. |
| Facility & tank management | A hauler shows up to a half-full tank, or a full one overflows. | Level trend drives haul scheduling and overfill alerts before the thief hatch is the problem. |
| Field reporting | Paper tickets keyed in a week later. | The work item the pumper closes on their phone is the record — timestamped, with the sensor trace attached. |
Five numbers worth managing
Production optimization software produces hundreds of charts. These are the five that change behavior.
Run time %
Producing hours over available hours, by well and by cause. The single number a production engineer should manage.
Deferred production
Barrels and Mcf not sold because a well was down. Converts downtime into money without any modeling assumptions.
Pump fillage
How full the barrel is each stroke. Low fillage is either an inflow problem or an overpumped well — both are fixable.
Cost per barrel
LOE divided by net barrels, per well. It exposes the marginal wells long before the annual review does.
Alarm-to-action time
How long between the exception and the field closing it. If this climbs, the alerting is noisy and people are tuning it out.
A worked example of deferred production
This is arithmetic, not a case study — run the same math on your own wells with the downtime calculator.
Detection delay is the only variable monitoring controls. Repair time, parts and crew availability are unchanged — which is why we quote recovered barrels from detection alone rather than a headline uplift percentage.
The modules this runs on
Common questions
What is oil production software?
Oil production software collects field data from producing wells — run status, pressure, tank level, motor current, flow — and turns it into the daily decisions that keep those wells producing: which wells are down, why, who goes where first, and which units need a setpoint change. It differs from production accounting software, which prices volumes and cuts owner checks.
What does production optimization software actually change?
Three things, in order of size: it shortens downtime by finding the down well hours instead of days sooner, it attributes lost barrels to a cause so recurring problems get fixed at the root, and it tunes artificial lift so wells are not overpumped or underpumped between annual reviews.
How does artificial lift optimization work on a rod pump?
Load and position data describe what the pump is doing downhole each stroke. From that you get fillage — how full the barrel is. Chronic low fillage means the pump is outrunning the reservoir and should slow down or cycle; a rising load trend with steady fillage points to mechanical wear. Continuous data lets those adjustments happen weekly instead of at the next failure.
Does production software replace a pumper?
No. It changes the order of the stops and removes the drive-by on a well that is running fine. The pumper is still the person who fixes the problem; the software is what tells them which of forty wells deserves the first two hours of the day.
Can production software work on wells without cell coverage?
Yes. Heartland modems fall back to satellite capacity where cellular is thin, which is the common case in western Kansas, the Anadarko fringe and parts of the Permian. Data buffers locally and backfills when the link returns, so the history stays complete.