Data Storage™ Blog, a discussion of practical records management.

4 Reasons for Oil and Gas Records Scanning

  

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Being in the records industry in Tulsa, OK, we often deal with Oil and Gas records.  I find they are different from other records in four ways.

  1.  These records have a cash value.  The geological data contained in these records can lead the company with the most efficient records management programs to higher profits.

  2.  Oil and Gas records have very long retention lives.  The geological records, mineral rights and royalty agreements and maintenance records are related to very long lived assets.  This means the records are voluntarily stored for very long retention periods.  (As opposed to records that are kept for long periods because of regulatory concerns.)

  3. Our customers often field hundreds of technicians, geologists, land men and other employees all over globe.  These employees and the customer company can benefit enormously from the ability to transmit and share their valuable documents over vast distances in real time.  Customers in the medical industry for instance, may need to share records with co-workers, but they are typically in the same building.

These characteristics mean oil and gas records are ideal candidates for digitization or imaging.  The cash value, long lives, information sharing needs and active management of these records allow companies in the energy sector to recover their investment in oil and gas records scanning much more quickly than companies in other industries. 

After scanning, the records are easily shared over vast distances, easily protected for disaster recovery purposes and inexpensively stored.  The value of the documents is actually increased by making them searchable with OCR technology.

Takeaways:

1. Oil and gas records are long lived, cash value docs that are often shared over long distances.
2. Records scanning costs are easily recovered for oil and gas records.
3. The value of records in the energy sector is increased by digitizing them. 

Feel free to comment or download our scanning project checklist.