Perhaps I should have titled this post, "Riddle me this Batman..."   Bam! Zap! etc....  now back to our regular scheduled blog post, where we explore the many lessons that can be learned from one industry to the next.

Let's start with one of the easier comparisons: How is an oil company like a bank?  Well (pun intended :), similar to a bank or financial institutions, oil companies have an energy trading and risk management (ETRM) division which operates like a stock market trading division of a bank. By the way,  SAS Bookrunner is designed specifically for oil and gas ETRM. In addition, any organization that has financial reporting will have similarities that could be covered by one of our SAS Financial Intelligence offerings.

Next, an oil company is similar to an insurance company when it comes to adding sensors to equipment in order to analyze the performance of drilling equipment. In the insurance world, this telematics is about adding sensors to cars and monitoring the driving habits to better set policy rates. The sensors on the drilling equipment likewise generate huge amounts of data which could feed into SAS Preventative Asset Maintenance to reduce downtime, optimize maintenance cycles, and improve root-cause analysis.

An oil company is like a retail manufacturer in the downstream processing of the oil and gas into different products. So the same SAS Supply Chain Intelligence solutions used by retail manufactures could be used by oil and gas companies to improve their supply chains as well. In addition, one specific supply chain solution for oil and gas is our Demand Forecasting for Refining" solution.

Finally, how is an oil company like a farm?   First of all, they both deal with fields. And, just like how SAS was originally designed to improve crop yields, SAS can be used to optimize the oil produced across all the wells in a field, and determine when it may be cost effective to use additional techniques on older wells to get more oil from them.

Overall, these comparisons provide further evidence for one of my an earlier blog post topics, how analytics are the ultimate renewable resource,  because you can apply analytical techniques from one industry to solve similar problems in other industries.

Image by Karen Eliot // license by cc