Val Nav: After 25 Years, It’s Only Getting Better

2023 has been an exciting year for Quorum Software. It’s not only a hallmark year for the company celebrating our 25 year delivering software to the energy industry, but also the 25 anniversary of our flagship Val Nav application

Over the years, Val Nav has provided the energy industry with integrated forecasting, type curves, economics, and reserves to keep companies ahead of a rapidly changing landscape. The key to our growth is a customer-centric approach, which has led within Val Nav – and the company at large – to create a single, seamless workflow that promotes quality data-driven decisions via thoughtful functionality and accurate calculations.

To celebrate a quarter of a century, let’s look at the evolution of Val Nav and some exciting changes to expect in the year ahead.

The History of Val Nav

It all started in 1998 when Energy Navigator was founded in Calgary. The original product, Decline Navigator, focused specifically on decline forecasting for reservoir engineers.

By 2000, Energy Navigator added economics calculations and reserves management capabilities to the tool, leading to the creation of a new name, Value Navigator – known today as Val Nav. Interestingly enough, the first employee from Energy Navigator is still on the Val Nav engineering team, along with several other veterans with over 20 years of experience in the space. Their commitment is a large part of Val Nav’s growth and success over the years.

In 2017, 3ESI acquired Energy Navigator, rebranding as Aucerna only one year later. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Quorum Software and Aucerna merged in 2021, making Val Nav a leading application in the planning, economics and reserves category in the Quorum Energy Suite.

Prior to the merger with Aucerna, Quorum owned a competing reserves software. However, Quorum chose to divest this product post-merger in favor of Val Nav’s strong brand recognition and product strength in the Canadian market, working with 60% of medium and large producers. It was clear that Val Nav would be the future of economic planning.

Why Val Nav for Economics and Reserves

Val Nav’s evolution over the years—from a small product focused on one specific market problem, to a leading software that integrates planning, economics, and reserves—reflects major changes in the market.

Companies of all sizes ranging from global supermajors to startups are dramatically improving their forecasting process. What often takes hours manually, can take less than 15 minutes for hundreds of wells using Val Nav. See what a Senior Reservoir Engineer at a Global Supermajor had to say about those time savings:

“Adopting Val Nav increased our efficiency so much that it let us move from monthly forecasting to weekly while still recognizing time savings. With the time savings, precision improved too because engineers had more time to discuss and evaluate the new, complex, and problematic wells. While the business gained both more frequent updates and more confidence in results, our employees reported improved work-life balance because Val Nav streamlined the process end-to-end with better tools and fewer headaches.”

Producers are prioritizing innovation and comprehensive software complex asset modeling and valuation. This allows them to reduce the amount of time spent on processes and inaccuracies as well as, which is especially important in today’s landscape.

Val Nav was developed by engineers at Energy Navigator with a product-focused mindset to make asset and reserves teams more efficient and productive. Michael Jegen, Principal Software Architect, is the first dedicated Val Nav employee and is still developing the application today. He says, “Our customers are our number one source of information,” We want to put out a product that makes their day-to-day lives easier, and the best way to do that is by taking their honest feedback to heart and delivering on reliable and consistent releases which align with client feedback.”

“Our team constantly leverages customer feedback for all aspects of Val Nav, from design and user experience to its capabilities and workflow,” said Cameron Zawalykut, Senior Product Manager. “That’s what allows us to improve the quality of the product and make it easier to use each and every day.”

Continuous improvement is why over 300 customers worldwide, spanning from single-engineer operators to supermajors with global engineering functions, trust Val Nav and Quorum Software with their economics and reserves calculations.

What’s Next for Val Nav

Though Val Nav is the most complete solution on the market, Quorum continues to invest in its development to make the user experience even better.

In 2024, Quorum is focusing continued efforts on migrating the Val Nav application to the cloud to support our cloud-first strategy and deliver a seamless software offering. Stay tuned for more updates by connecting in our user groups or Qnections event series around the world.

After 25 years, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank our customers for their unwavering support and our engineering teams for their constant work and improvement. Here’s to the next 25!

And for more information about Quorum’s planning, economics and reserves solutions, or to request a demo, visit https://www.quorumsoftware.com/solutions/planning-economics-reserves/