Refactor

SITUATION

Tecton Geologic, a specialist in the geothermal drilling sector, created a state-of-the-art electronic data recorder called TopHand to provide rig monitoring for engineers located remotely from the drilling site. This data presentation system was so successful internally that the company’s senior management team approached Digital Foundry to learn more about the feasibility of making the system scalable enough to serve the industry at large. There were a number of challenges associated with this project. Perhaps most importantly, Tecton needed to make sure that a large amount of data could be presented quickly via a web-based application and that the data could be kept confidential.

SOLUTION

In order to make the TopHand system available industry-wide, Digital Foundry translated the system’s data presentation model to a web-based format. We also developed a custom user interface using the Microsoft Silverlight application framework to display the drilling data in a more dynamic and interactive way. In order to ensure that Tecton would be able to maintain data confidentiality, we implemented a secure authentication interface to manage users and their site access rights. All of these requirements were implemented within a five-week timeline to provide maximum benefit to both the stakeholders and drilling engineers at Tecton Geologic.

RESULTS

We understood that Tecton needed to provide immediate and dynamic drilling data to field engineers, and we were able to assist our client by:

• Providing design direction: Digital Foundry provided the guidance needed to create a custom view of the information available from TopHand.
• Implementing web services: By making the data from the TopHand servers available via web services, we were able to display the drilling information online in real time.
• Improving storage for TopHand data: Data collection, presentation, and storage was a top priority for the Tecton stakeholders, so we leveraged Adobe’s PDF technology to efficiently gather TopHand data into an organized catalogue.