The story behind Meters becoming Acumen

What is in a name?

The story behind Meters becoming Acumen.

They say that everyone is an expert with the virtue of hindsight.

When acquiring the technology and launching Expro Meters in 2008, there was a need for lower cost wellhead surveillance with an underserved market, except for premium wells. SONAR Meters offered a genuinely disruptive technology and effectively created its own market.

At that time, who could have foreseen the changes that the upstream oil and gas industry would go through; a “lower for longer” oil price in 2014, followed by a global pandemic where countries and industries stood still, and the necessary consumption of hydrocarbons and derivative products have effectively been idled.

While recovery factors have been increasing as an industry, we typically recover less than 50% of the initial oil in place. On a background of capital constraint, with reduced activity in drilling new wells, climate change and a global effort to reduce our carbon footprint, operating companies are focusing on maximising production from their existing well stock and reducing their investment in reserves replacement.

This maximisation trend has fuelled growth in the Meters business during the industry’s longest downturn. This growth has been driven by our customers’ evolving business model of maximising their existing investment. This drive has not only created a need for measurement but also an understanding of it.

Combined with the digitalization of the oilfield becoming a reality, we see a growing trend in what we might call contextualising instead of interpreting data as our customers look for immediacy in resolving or arresting production decline on mature assets.

We realised that the market needed more than a meters provider, it needs a more holistic offering. This initiated a change in our business model from purely harvesting data to going beyond data and will provide our customers with the actionable insight they can rely and act upon.

We operate a well site simple business model where raw data is collected, hosted in the cloud and processed into engineering data with a final report produced and typically presented within 24 hours of the measurement activity. It is not possible to bring all the experts required to the customer’s well site. By hosting and processing data in the cloud, our experts and their expertise are available for every data set.

Meters as a brand name no longer encapsulated what we wanted to achieve for our customers, we looked for a name that better represented our journey and where we are now. We chose Acumen to represent quickness, accuracy, and good judgement of insight, and we also refocused the business to concentrate on these four key challenges.

We have shaped and aligned our rebranding to focus on the outcome and leverage our disruptive technologies to remove bias to provide transparency for every unique process challenge. We are best placed in the industry to provide a fully comprehensive tool kit from non-intrusive to fully intrusive measurements. In the future, we will see virtual measurements added to our toolkit.

Regardless of which tool is selected, in an overly task-orientated industry, we focus on results and our goal is the actionable insight we provide to customers to help achieve their preferred outcome which is going beyond data.