Storm Chaser

Our team partnered with Windom Peak Corporation to disrupt and transform traditional capital budgeting processes in the rapidly evolving oil and gas industry. Our challenge was to make corporate goals (and the means to achieve them) transparent to decision makers in ways not previously attainable. We strongly believed that this experience would create opportunities to reduce costs, improve decision making, and support internal alignment with corporate goals: Improve business process efficiencies, Lower Operating Expenses per Unit of Production by freeing up months of senior management time, and Improve corporations’ agility and transparency in reallocating capital, in volatile business environments.

Our front-end user interface design and augmented reality prototypes for desktop and iPad applications have laid heavy groundwork for Windom Peak’s patent-pending SaaS product. Our conceptual design uses this augmented reality alongside big data analytics and distributed computing to visualize risk, constraints, and goals on a multi-year horizon.

Three key design innovations streamline the intense workflow of capital planning teams: [1] A dynamic augmented reality mountain that conveys a summit as the corporation’s goal one, two, even five years in the future, while the mountain’s local terrain steepness, contours, and color mapping use AR to illustrate portfolio risk. [2] Our modern front-end design enables distributed computing and cloud-based data analytics to calculate if-then scenarios in real time, such as the effects of oil price shocks on a portfolio’s Net Present Value, projects’ contribution to corporate portfolio goals, and flexible alternatives. [3] Our iPad companion app allows simple and collaborative data visualization in an open-office or boardroom setting.

--

This app is projected to shrink the time required to perform capital budgeting from 6 months to weeks and do it in a quantitative, transparent manner, reducing the number of iterations between managers and planning staff. Meanwhile, existing research suggests that major competing SaaS products require heavy amounts of training and struggle to provide actionable insights. By delivering immense time-savings in the capital planning process, our interactive technology is primed and ready to transform the oil and gas industry.