WellWise: API‑driven Well Cost Estimation for ExxonMobil

The WellWise Well Cost Estimator is an internal web‑based product that allows drilling and cost engineers to accurately and efficiently create cost and time estimates, monitor in‑progress jobs, and access historical reports.

The intricacy of the industry, the sheer magnitude of ExxonMobil’s business, multiple data sources, and the flexibility of features and functionality required impeccable attention to detail.

Drilling and cost engineers are required to create detailed estimates before the organization will provide an approval for expenditure for all new drilling and subsurface jobs.

ExxonMobil engaged Fjord Design Studios to analyze the current process and develop a product that allows users to make use of historical data, tribal knowledge, and changing landscapes to create accurate estimates that optimize investments by balancing risk to maximize performance.

In addition to the estimate process, we were asked to address monitoring and reporting of job performance in real time, encouraging data standardization and creating clean historical references that provide organization‑wide budget and performance transparency.

• Enable engineers to base estimates on historical performance, tribal knowledge, and current conditions.
• Standardize data structures to support organization‑wide reporting and transparency.
• Reduce administrative overhead so engineers can focus on high‑value activities.

• Democratization of Users base estimates and designs on previous job information that had historically been stranded on desktops. The product exposes over 18,000 historical jobs, sortable by country, date, and other defining attributes.
• Rapid creation & iteration: A streamlined workflow allows for rapid creation of speculative designs and iterations of alternate solutions. Drag‑and‑drop functionality, duplication, and manual adjustments give users complete control of their estimates.
• Job comparison: Flexibility to compare different designs in a single view allows engineers and peers to evaluate the potential ROI for each job.
• Progressive reporting: Quantitative and qualitative information is captured throughout the life of the job in a centralized platform, simplifying daily reporting and end‑of‑job reporting.

Through exhaustive user interviews and in‑depth analysis of processes and tools, the team developed a clear understanding of the problems we needed to solve for.

• A patchwork of disparate and overlapping tools created significant workflow inefficiencies.
• Manual processes and time‑consuming tasks took engineers away from organizational improvement and high‑value activities.
• Knowledge and experience were not effectively transferred; creativity and ingenuity were diverted into ad‑hoc tools to meet unmet needs.
• Delivery of cost estimates took a disproportionate amount of time and effort that could be better spent on bottom‑line‑impacting work.

• Culture shift: By focusing on transparency and knowledge sharing, communication barriers are reduced and employees gain insight into historical and real‑time performance data to better inform decision‑making.
• Investment optimization: Risk‑averse budgeting tied up millions of dollars for entire fiscal years; creating estimates using real performance data could free nearly $500M for other investments.
• Employee efficiency: Drilling engineer cost‑estimating workload is reduced by the equivalent of 5–10 FTEs, enabling more focus on high‑value activities.
• Streamlining technology: Replaces 10 individual tools/databases, provides a single touchpoint for data access, and leverages existing cloud infrastructure to decrease cost and increase speed.
• Data hygiene: Defining company‑wide standards improves the efficiency and impact of historical data, laying a foundation for future analytics and automation.
• Design partnership: By keeping communication open and consistently pushing innovative design thinking, the final product was positioned to drive meaningful impact across the organization.