Engineers: Want to Save 10+ Hours a Week?
Production engineers in oil and gas typically spend a significant portion of their week on surveillance — reviewing trends, checking gauges, and identifying wells that need attention. Much of that time is spent on work that could be automated without sacrificing decision quality.
Where engineer time goes
A typical production engineer's week includes:
- Daily trend reviews — checking performance against expectations across the well fleet
- Anomaly investigation — following up on alerts and identifying root causes
- Optimisation analysis — evaluating which wells have improvement opportunities
- Reporting — producing status updates and performance summaries
Not all of this time is equal. Some of it requires genuine engineering judgement. Some of it is pattern recognition that can be handled by a well-configured system.
The challenge is that most surveillance tools don't separate these two categories. Engineers spend time doing both, often without clear visibility into which wells genuinely need their attention today.
What 10 hours back actually means
Ten hours per engineer per week is roughly 25% of working time. For a production team of five engineers, that's 50 person-hours per week — over 2,500 hours per year — that could be redirected from surveillance to higher-value work.
Higher-value work includes:
- Investigating wells with unusual or unexpected behaviour
- Evaluating non-routine optimisation opportunities
- Engaging with field operations teams on implementation challenges
- Working on longer-term field development questions
How automated surveillance creates this headroom
Nexgineer™ creates this headroom by doing the systematic screening work automatically — evaluating every well against current performance expectations, identifying which ones have optimisation opportunities, and ranking those opportunities by predicted impact.
The engineer starts the day with a prioritised action list rather than a set of dashboards to work through. Time spent on routine surveillance drops. Time available for genuine engineering work increases.
The 10 hours figure is based on observed outcomes in early deployments. The actual benefit depends on field size, current surveillance processes, and how many wells a team is managing.
See how Nexgineer™ can change how your team spends its time. Book a demo.
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