Blogs

It’s official: Shell enters the oil sands rush with its Alberta project. It has plans to pursue the employment of steam-driven extraction methods.

As a small business owner servicing a niche market in the oil and gas industry, you’re planning on a major expansion into the Edmonton region.

It was midnight when you had a great idea, so you reached for a pen and a pad, but wait, where'd it go? That was when you realized you’d gone digital, so you powered up the bedside tablet and let the ideas flow.

As a new service provider to the Canadian oil and gas industry, you’ve learned quickly just how complicated it is to grow your business. Your goal is to gain entry into northern Alberta where the Athabasca reserves exist – your patented process for in situ extraction of bitumen has attracted a number of investors and you’re ready to work with clients servicing the Cold Lake Deposits.

You’d just arrived at a remote location up in the Alberta sands region to check on your install of your new product when a call came in from your bookkeeper back in Calgary. It was then you realized just how problematic the Open Invoice could be, when your “best practices” amounted to coffee-stained stacks of orders and invoices on the bookkeeper's desk.

Finally, all of your hard work is paying off – you just got word that one of the major Canadian oil companies in the Alberta oil sands wants your company to provide the product you’ve been pitching to them over the past few months.

“Slow growth? In the Canadian oil and gas sector?”

It wasn’t too long after you’d read something on the importance of information intelligence management that a perfect example surfaced, one that was sure to benefit your operations.

Are you one of the small businesses serving Canadian oil companies in a remote area of Canada? In the kind of place where you stay awake at nights to scare the wolves away from your food cache?

With $55 billion attributed to new capital projects last year alone, the oil and gas sector is one of the largest contributors to the Canadian economy. A lot of those dollars were spread from one coast to the other in providing for manufacturer and contractor services – $21 billion went into the federal and provincial governments. An article in The Globe and Mail provides an overview on the occurring growth: “The biggest contributor to Canada’s balance of trade is, by a wide margin, oil and gas. The industry is a major job creator, employing more than 550,000 people.”