Strados International Limited: Company Overview
During the last decade, virtually every oil and gas industry sector has been experiencing rapid and sometimes disruptive change. As a result, market conditions continue to affect investment decisions and impact industry activity. In particular, the upstream industry, which focuses primarily on searching, drilling, and extracting commodities from the earth, faces a shrinking talent pool of specialised technical expertise due to the price market volatility and the growing focus on efficiencies and continuous cost discipline.
The upstream sector manages large budgets allocated to personnel recruitment, training, and development to build the knowledge competencies needed to keep the industry thriving. However, when the market conditions produce massive workforce reductions, and seasoned technical professionals leave the asset management organisations, E&P companies lose a significant competitive advantage.
Moreover, with so many companies impacted financially due to COVID-19, the energy industry faced a global mobility slowdown challenging the relocation of specialised professionals in the last years. This trend has caused a substantial decline in hiring from the international markets. As a result, it has become essential to reduce travel budgets and expatriates’ reliance by recruiting, educating, and developing local talent. Nevertheless, creating a successful nationalisation programme requires detailed planning, including overcoming challenges in managing the visa process for bringing expatriates as specialised staff.1
The global energy industry also faces other pressing challenges: the digital transformation and the energy transition to the 2050 Net Zero ambition. These challenges make changing, adapting, and thriving paramount for the upstream industry.
“At Strados International Limited, we understand that digital transformation is a must in the sector. Therefore, we offer an innovative model that combines the 4.0 industrial revolution technologies with the outsourcing business model’s risk-sharing and cost savings efficiencies.” — Judith Narváez, Managing Director and Founder.
We are transforming the upstream sector’s asset management organisations, particularly the subsurface management teams, by offering an innovative model that combines the fourth industrial revolution technologies with the outsourcing business model’s risk-sharing and cost savings efficiencies. As a result, we are changing the interdisciplinary subsurface teams from function-based, in-sourced, in-person organisations into process-based, outsourced, and distributed workforce for the broader energy industry.
This model brings several benefits to the upstream industry. Our highly skilled subsurface professionals virtually share their knowledge and expertise to provide innovative services in reservoir studies and create new products, solutions and projects. Furthermore, this model has the ability and flexibility to attract and retain top talent by diversifying candidate pools, hiring workers outside a specific market, and finding the right employees in international markets; without going through complicated and expensive expatriate recruitment processes. In addition, workers benefit from not commuting to work and moving away from costly urban areas without sacrificing access to competitive jobs.
Thus, the energy industry can overcome the ongoing skill gap by attracting retirees, bringing them back, and recruiting more women.
Usually, the asset management organisations have been highly reliant on Capex models to provide the computing infrastructure and specialised software on-premises data centres, assuming the cost of ownership, the complexity of management, and the need for long-term contracts or up-front investments. On the contrary, STRADOS’s Opex-only budget model cuts substantial investments in IT ownership, intricate licensing, and long-term contracts, among other benefits. As a result, it can realise significant cost reductions and risk mitigation in petroleum and gas projects’ capital investment and operational expenses.
We deploy comprehensive and flexible solutions using the consumption-based pricing model, elastic cloud computing, and AI and ML automation. Additional critical deployments include the latest cybersecurity solutions and state-of-the-art cloud data protection strategies to manage customers’ data in a safe environment. As a result, this model improves team collaboration, thus staff productivity, operational resilience, and business agility.
STRADOS started as a project from our founder Judith Narvaez, who, with more than 30 years of experience in the exploration and production business, saw the need to transform, update and revolutionise the industry for a step-change cost reductions, efficiencies, and performance. She has worked for oil and gas conventional development projects, both off- and on-shore, green- and brownfields, and a wide range of types of geological formations: clastic and carbonate, and various hydrocarbons, including heavy-oil, crude-oil, gas and gas-condensate. In addition, she worked for thirteen years in various geographical regions as an expatriate reservoir engineering advisor assigned to different multinational joint ventures involving both national and international E&P operators.
STRADOS aims to master all stages of the reservoir evaluation process, from data analysis and interpretation to reservoir characterisation, and from integrated reservoir modelling and subsurface uncertainty analysis to performance and field recovery forecasting for all oil and gas fields’ life cycle phases. Throughout this process, the company strives to help decision-makers from energy companies to develop insights concerning the geological features controlling the potential business outcomes in their upstream projects.
To learn more about how our model works and all of the benefits for small, medium, and large-sized corporations, contact us.
Let’s take the subsurface business to the next level!
References
1. Brunel International N.V. & Oil and Gas Job Search. (2021). Energy Outlook 2021 (Report), page 29. Retrieved from https://energyoutlookguide.com/2021-energy-outlook/
