When surveying the geophysical staff of a European Major Oil & Gas company about what they thought Velit’s best feature was, the response we got surprised me. Instead of the technological features of the software, the main praise we received related to Velit’s Workflow system.
“I was so tired of Petrel’s black box, but Velit helps me understand everything the software is doing to come to its answer”, one respondent wrote.
The Workflow module is not sexy, nor does it contain any fancy technology to shout about, but if you’re a geologist or geophysicist and want to understand the technical aspects of how your depth conversion has been calculated, then you might love the ‘work horse’ engine at the heart of Velit, as much as our other users do.
Driving Velit
Velit has been around for almost 20 years. If you would have used the software back then, you would have driven it manually, completing every operation the software required you to do. While the ‘manual mode’ was very powerful, insofar as you can get the software to perform some amazing tricks, it evolved to require an expert user to use the tool set.
Roughly 10 years ago, the workflow system was developed such that it would enable you to get the software to perform a series of automated processes as ‘a workflow’. At the time, this system revolutionised the use of the software as it could be used for a number of different reasons:
- It enables the use of the software processes to be automated
- It is a fully transparent system, so that you can see exactly how it is coming to its answers
- You can re-depth convert an existing model containing a new well at the click of a button
- It can be used as part of your audit trail when you come back to a project after some time
- You can create a ‘recipe book’ of workflows for your team/organisation, which can help maintain a company standard practice and/or help junior staff complete work at a more senior level
- You can create ‘looping-workflows’ to run multiple realisations and perform stochastic depth conversion.
Using the workflow system enables you to select any depth conversion function from an extensive library of industry standard techniques. This can help when the geology becomes progressively more complex, and you require a niche function or two to solve the problem. For each of the boxes within the workflow, you can double click on them to investigate how the software is performing that one function, for example.
For all its positives, the main drawback of using Velit’s workflow system is that the interface required you to learn a bit about the software and how to configure the workflow to perform optimally. This issue however, was overcome when we developed the Wizard interface.
The Wizard
Velit’s Wizard is a Generic User Interface (GUI) which sits on top of the workflow system. This easy to use step-by-step way of driving the software has really opened Velit up to being suitable for every level of user experience. The significance of the Wizard though is that for every click you make and option you choose, the software is recording your steps such that when you have finished your Best Technical Case model, you can simply click ‘Create Workflow’ and it will automatically create the workflow for you.
Moreover, if you are performing stochastic depth conversion, you can parameterise the range of variation per layer through the Wizard. You then select ‘Create Looped Workflow’ to automatically create a run which will generate 1000 depth models at the click of a button.
The workflow uses batch processing so that you can have multiple CPU’s compute the tasks simultaneously, which can literally decimate the processing time on today’s modern machines. For example a 1000 iterations on a medium size dataset on a 16 core machine might take you 4 – 5 hours to process.
If you feel as though you’re tired with Petrel’s Black Box when it comes to depth conversion, then look no further than Velit, where you’ll be able to scrutinise every step of your journey through the software and fully understand your results.
If you can’t currently perform this workflow in your existing software, then please get in touch with us now and we can arrange a demonstration and an evaluation licence for you to see the value when applied to your datasets.
If you’d like to know more about Velit, then click here. To contact us for a free evaluation, e-mail us on sales@equipoisesoftware.com.
The software is provided by S&P Global (who we partner with for Kingdom) with perpetual and subscription pricing available on request. We offer a series of Teams meetings throughout the evaluation to help you step up the learning curve and enable you to see results for yourself. We also provide a series of Depth Conversion training courses which you can click here to find out more.