PIDX held its 1st Annual Meeting and Conference in Houston this month

On Thursday 15th September 2011 PIDX officially held its first Annual meeting and Fall Conference. Over 80 delegates from 37 companies from the oil and gas industry were represented to listen to Tony Aming, the President of PIDX International give a summary of the first 5 months of PIDX’s launch and operations. After Tony concluded the formal portion of the meeting, the Conference, with a theme of “Mobile Solutions” was kicked off by a stimulating presentation by Dave Brooks of Software AG, a major player in the supply of mobile applications to help business become more efficient. Dave gave some fascinating examples of how Blackberry, iPhone and the iPad are being used in such industries as Fast Moving Retail and challenged the audience to think how they could be applied in the Oil & Gas industry.

Other presentations were given by Key Energy Services, Liquid Frameworks, Social Mobility, Amalto Technologies, PPDM a standards body for Data Management in the oil and gas industry, and finally TEEC, The Engineering Essentials Company who gave a fascinating insight into how XML can be used to more efficiently manage standards documentation.

Each of the major PIDX workgroups also gave the audience an update on the current projects in PIDX standards development, plus gave invitations to the audience to join their workgroup sessions the following day to add expertise and input to their development work.

Dan Collins, the Past Chair of PIDX stated that he was very encouraged to see such an enthusiastic reception to the new PIDX, and that PIDX was truly setting itself global sights and presenting new technologies to the community.

PIDX was fortunate to have three sponsors for this meeting, Pervasive, Take Solutions and finally Siemens Energy who kindly hosted a social drinks and canapés session after the Thursday meeting.

On Friday 16th September, three workgroups met to further the development of various projects, 1- The two work groups Business Messages and Business Processes held a joint meeting, 2 - Classification and Cataloguing, and 3- Supplier Performance KPI data reporting.

A delegation of the PIDX Executive visit China

As a part of PIDX's new mission to really reach out across the globe to the oil and gas community, an opportunity arose through our developing relationship with Energistics, to meet a broad range of China's Operators. Four members of the Executive Committee, Tony Aming, Dan Collins, Terry Thomas and Dave Wallis visited China in early August 2011 and PIDX gave an introduction regarding our open standards for eBusiness to a group of more than 75 delegates from most of the major Chinese Oil and Gas operators. The meeting resulted in high levels of interest during the meeting. Based on discussions during the day, PIDX members were invited to meet with CNPC and Petrochina the following day for more detailed discussions around our experiences with eCommerce across the globe.

It is expected that there would be a follow-up visit to China by various Executive Committee to meet directly with many of the Operators and hopefully some of the national suppliers and software service providers as well.

PIDX Executive Committee Gives Industry Webinar

In this exclusive interview Dave Wallis, Chair of Marketing for the PIDX Committee speaks with Tim Haidar of Oil & Gas iQ about the importance of data management and standardisation in today's global oil and gas industry.

In the course of the interview, Dave touches on:

• Why data management is so important for the oil and gas industry in the 21st century
• Why data standardisation is fundamental to an increasingly more data heavy energy sector
• The two areas of data in which standardisation can play a massive part in improving the who business process
• Why data management is far behind other industry verticals like pharmaceuticals and the automotive industry and what it can do to redress the balance
• Why the dynamic with IT functions within the oil and gas industry is often almost like a contracting relationship and not business integral and how this attitude can be changed
• PIDX's ongoing mission to inform and reform the way the oil and gas industry thinks about the data management process

PIDX London Conference voted Huge Success

On Thursday 19th May 2011 PIDX held one of its most successful Europe meetings, with attendance being up 50% on last year. The conference sponsor was Shell .Over 36 companies from the Oil and Gas industry were represented and topics ranged from e-Catalogues, eInvoicing, MDM( Master Data Management ) , Materials Management, through to updates on two new standards for the automation of Supplier Performance Data, and Terminal Data Exchange.

The Conference was opened with a Keynote address from Huibert Vigeveno, Shell’s VP of Supply & Distribution Europe where he outlined Shell’s planed initiatives around managing distribution in a very large company. Huibert claimed that Shell has the largest number of filling stations in Europe of any company, a challenge of more than scale.. Bill Le Sage continued this energetic enthusaism with an update on the new PIDX organisation, its executive team and the structure of the standards setting workgroups and committees.

As a part of the regular meetings which PIDX holds, there will be two more later this year, the first of these will be in Houston on 15th and 16th of September 2011 followed by another London conference in October 2011.

"At the inaugural Executive Committee meeting of PIDX Inc. Bill Le Sage hands Tony Aming the new President, a gavel with which to control Executive meetings"