PointCross - Reserves Vault

Reserves Vault

If a decision is made on behalf of the company that is in any way related to the reporting of reserves (producible oil or gas from the reservoir using a recovery technique that the company plans to employ) then it must be tracked and it must be auditable. Period. That is the standard of governance and reporting that the FASB-69 stipulates and that which the best E&P companies in the world follow.

All technical data including geological and geophysicists data and interpretations are critical to the decisions made in deciding which plays to pursue, which drilling scenarios to pursue in an exploration program, which data is relevant in the calculations that lead to estimation of the reservoir characteristics and the probable reserves. The capital investment decisions and the options considered there are relevant to the decisions made related to the type of recovery technique that will be used and therefore the amount of recoverable resources from that reservoir. In the production phase, all the production data as well as the results of static and dynamic tests are very relevant to the estimation of the remaining reserves and therefore the reported proven reserves data. All these data form the basis for reportable reserves and they are auditable under the FASB-69 provisions as well as the Sarbanes Oxley act.

The Reserves Vault is a special configuration of the standard Orchestra contextual Business Information Framework so that ALL reserves related information can be automatically flowed into a “Vault” like virtual system where it is maintained in a safe, secure, recoverable, audit traceable data-store environment that will form the basis for all management reporting, securities and exchange related reporting, and support the SOX governance rules.

The checks and balances designed into a compliance regime mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and specifically under Section 404 of this act, require activities of the company’s management and its operation, relating to reporting of finance and performance to the stockholders, are auditable, and that reports and raw data examined during the audit are maintained with total data integrity in a sequestered environment. There are primarily two types of stakeholders - auditors and legal counsel - who must have primary access to this sequestered data, which will include email and other communications conducted in the capacity of official business transactions. These communications include email attachments. However, the scope of normal business activities also includes certain workflows and instructions codified into various processes, such as management of issues, risks, action items, milestones & deliverables, and decisions. Since management decisions are frequently made on the basis of distilled information presented through dashboards and other call-to-action facilities, the associated data flow that drives these management information dashboards and the underlying spreadsheets and data reports are also subject to governance audits, and must facilitate discovery for litigation.

The working area in which all content and communications are stored is not a secure method for audit purposes. This is because the versions of the data and content are constantly being changed, edited, and deleted, so that people are not inundated with a barrage of unusable information, or work-in-progress. However, such changes carry the history of all decisions being made, and their loss can be a serious detriment to both auditors as well as management, because of the increased potential for pieces of information to be discovered out of context, and their use in a legal action can spell serious trouble and cost.

The Reserves Vault approach uses a separate vault that is solely accessible by audit boards and legal counsel, who can examine but not modify any content, or the way it is organized once deposited into the vault. Reserves-Vault therefore becomes a readily accessible resource that constantly captures all the content listed above, into the same organization as it exists in the working Reserves-Vault or Orchestra (the general purpose platform underlying Reserves-Vault) systems. Only very small communities of users, such as auditors and legal counsel, have access to this vault, and they can conduct their audits and discovery processes uninterrupted.

Reserves-Vault provides users with search facilities to discover content related to specific matters, without the need to re-construct the context within which decisions were made. Working jointly with corporate management, audit teams and legal counsel, Reserves-Vault can also be configured to accept custom search rules and automated alerting, based on patterns of communications and levels or types of business activity.

To Learn More

Email:

Call: +1 281 295 1900