dwacynd.info

Oil seems to be on every bodies mind a lot lately both in the good sense and the bad sense, but regardless of what one thinks of the oil industry it is the #1 most efficient energy source in the world. And if we didn’t have it we would still be on horse and buggies or riding a bicycle to and from work.The oil industry has always had a mystical aura about it in the fact that it just appears out of the ground and the thoughts of Jed shooting at the ground in the Beverly Hillbillies and it comes bubbling out of the ground. In reality this is not the case, but it does make for a good story.I am not going to go into the many different reasons of why oil is a good thing, but I do want to address the bad publicity it has gotten in the area of risk that is involved when investing into the oil industry.First I want to disclose that I come from a family that was born and raised in Southern Illinois who made their living working in the oil industry by drilling and servicing oil wells. I know people are never aware that there are such things as oil wells in Illinois, but there are approximately 650 oil fields and around 30,000 oil wells in the state. It is a dirty business and not very many people want to do this kind of work, but we are all thankful for the people who have chosen to work in this industry.When most people think of investing in oil wells they think of dry holes and unscrupulous individuals like Snidely Whiplash hiding in the weeds waiting to prey on another suspecting investor with cash hanging out of their pocket. Again, another myth. The reality of investing in oil wells is that with this kind of investment you can at least visit the well site and see where your money was invested and talk to the operator who you invested with and find out the situation if it is either good or bad. Not so when an individual invests in the stock market or mutual funds. And that is why I wrote the article about the “10 Myths of Investing in Oil”When people invest money they are either buying stocks or mutual funds or REITS or some other type of investments I can’t even pronounce and how do they do it? Either online with a computer screen in front of them or at an Edward Jones or Financial Institution’s office. And even then you don’t know what you are investing in. You get to meet a nice person to whom you write the check to, but that is about it. And is it risky? Can you say “Bernie Madoff?”My point to the story is not to make light of investing in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, or CD’s or other financial instruments. It is only to let people know that investing in oil is no more risky and sometimes less risky than the many different financial products that is touted by the many financial institutions.Relax, enjoy the journey and hopefully I have shared some information that will benefit you in some way.Myth #1 – You can lose all of your money.
Truth – It depends on how you want to look at your money. In reality the money that you invest into the oil business is different than the money you would invest into the stock market or the purchase of real estate. When someone invests into the stock market or the purchase of real estate they are investing with “post” tax dollars. Meaning they are using the money they have left over after paying the taxes that are owed on the money they earned to make the investment. But when someone invests into the drilling of an oil well they are given preferential treatment from the federal government in the form of Tangible and Intangible investment allowances. What this means is that if you invested $25,000.00 into the drilling of an oil well you would be allowed to write off or deduct the Intangible amount of your investment off of your annual gross income 60% to 75% of your investment could be written off against your personal income) of the year you made the investment. In essence you could never lose all of your money, because it never was all your money in the first place. The government was going to get their part of your income regardless whether you invested into an oil well or not. Generally they were going to get between 35% to 40% of your income anyway. So when you invest into an oil well you are really using some of your money and part of the government’s money.
________________________________________
Myth #2 – It is more profitable to buy stock in Exxon or a major oil company from my stock broker than to invest in an oil well.
Truth – When you purchase stock from a stock broker or online in essence you are buying tiny piece of a huge corporation with millions of many different pieces. There is some comfort in knowing that it is a large corporation with holdings all over the world, but it also comes with a huge overhead to support. When one purchases stock in such a large corporation with their large overhead it takes a lot of movement in the market for one to make a substantial profit, plus you are buying the stock with “post” tax dollars so you only getting to invest 60% to 70% of the income you had earned. You have already given up a large part of your buying power before you even start. When you invest into an oil well it is called “Direct Participation” and that is what is happening. You are investing directly either into one oil well or a group of oil wells. Your investment is more focused on the production of oil and not on the running of a huge corporation. Your investment will have the chance to grow faster and larger when it is focused instead of thrown into a huge group where it is used to run the machine.
________________________________________
Myth # 3 – Most oil wells are a dry hole. They only find oil in about 1 out 10 wells drilled.
Truth – There are different kinds of drilling when it comes to finding oil. The type that most people have heard of is “Wildcatting”. It is what was talked about on the TV shows of Dallas and other movies about oil wells where the guy goes out into the middle of nowhere and when he is down and out on his last dollar hits a gusher of a well and it blows up in the air and everyone lives happily ever after like the Beverly Hillbillies. In situations like that where one is drilling in the middle of no known oil production the odds of getting a dry hole are probably more like 25 to 1 that you will get a dry hole.The other type of drilling that is done and has a much higher success rate is “Developmental Drilling”. When you are doing developmental drilling you are either drilling next to or very near to existing oil wells or oil fields. This type of drilling is highly successful and can sometimes have a 100% success rate. When investing into an oil well be sure to clarify if the investment is a wildcat or a developmental drilling project. Chances are if you are investing into a developmental drilling project you odds of hitting oil and making money are going to be very good.
________________________________________
Myth # 4 – If someone offers you an opportunity to invest into an oil well it is a scam.
Truth – The best way to find out if you are getting a good investment opportunity is to do the research. Generally that is why people buy stocks and investments from a stock brokerage house or online service they have heard of, because they are not really interested in doing the research. An investment representative will ask them their tolerance for risk and take their money and invest it for them. Minimal risk. Minimal return.When in investing into an oil well do the research. A for real oil drilling and exploration company will invite you to the drilling site and explain the risks to you first hand. They will allow you to hear what the geologist has to say in regard to whether the well is going to be commercial or not in his opinion. Legitimate oil operators don’t shy away from the investor who wants to learn more about the process of drilling and producing oil wells. They welcome the questions and comments and it allows you to get directly to the people who are making the oil well investment decisions and thereby increasing your knowledge of the oil industry and reducing your risk.
________________________________________
Myth #5 – I know that the only reason I am asked to invest into an oil well is because they know it isn’t going to be a good well.
Truth – If anyone really knew how much oil an oil well would make before it was drilled do you really think they would be asking you to invest? Nobody knows. And I mean nobody knows how much an oil well is going to produce. When a project is based on developmental drilling it is easier to get an idea and a possible range, but even then nobody ever really knows how much an oil well will make. All oil wells are different. They can be right next to each other and be totally different. And that is why oil operators share the wealth and the risk when drilling. Because of the unknown. Even the largest companies in the world like Exxon, Shell or BP share the risk when they are drilling new projects, because they too know that there is an unknown factor when drilling oil wells and it is better to have a piece of a lot of oil wells than have all of your eggs in basket per se with just one oil well.
________________________________________
Myth #6 – Investing into an oil well is easy, but it is after they start the well is when it gets expensive.
Truth – Very rarely are the carrying costs to maintain and operate an existing oil well excessive. The exception is rare. The cost to prepare, drill and complete and oil well are expensive, but if an oil well is completed properly the cost to maintain and operate are almost minimal. There are some wells that may go a year or beyond before ever needing any additional maintenance. Only when you have factors such as corrosive fluids or other chemical reactions down hole do you encounter excessive maintenance costs. It is rare that you will have excessive mechanical costs after an oil well has been completed. Your oil operator is also your partner when you are involved in direct participation oil drilling and they do not to be burdened with high carrying costs either. You can be assured they have already factored carrying costs into the equation, because they want the oil well to be a viable investment too.
________________________________________
Myth #7 – Drilling oil wells sound dangerous and could have a lot of liability and I don’t want to become part of the liability factor.
Truth – Investing into oil wells is like when you buy stock. You are only liable for the amount of your investment. In the stock market if the company you invested in goes broke or has a product liability issue you are not affected by these issues other than your investment may go down or become worthless. The same is true when investing in an oil well where you have an operating agreement between yourself and the operator stating that you are not liable for any actions of the oil well and the operator is assuming the responsibility and liability. It is like getting the best of both worlds. You are on the ground so to speak in the front row watching your investment, but without any of the liability.
________________________________________
Myth # 8 – Oil wells don’t have a very long life span.
Truth – Oil wells have a very long life span. Oil wells have a tendency to begin with a higher rate of production, because in the beginning you are letting off the pressure that has been captured underneath the earth’s surface for millions of years and over time it is like putting a very tiny tube into the side of huge tire full of air whereby it eventually slows down to a slow stream and continues to blow out air. Oil wells are similar. After the initial pressure has been released there is still oil in place and some wells will continue to produce 20, 30, 40 & 50 years under their own pressure. Some oil wells will need to get a push later in life with an operator injecting water or some form of gas to give the oil a push and help it come out. But generally an oil well has a long life. The production won’t be at a very high daily rate, but it will keep going and going and going like the Ever Ready Battery Bunny.
________________________________________
Myth # 9 – If the price of oil goes down and the well is a low producer I won’t ever get my money back.
Truth – Everything in life is cyclical. Things go up and thing and things go down. And the price of oil is not different. However, in today’s world the market place is different. We now have 1 Billion people in India with a 300 Million middle class that is evolving and we have 1.1 Billion people in China that has 300 Million middle class that is evolving there too and are consuming more and more energy to help their countries grow and prosper. Plus like the stock market oil wells are known to be long performers and continue to produce and give an economical return to their investors. In the stock market if the sales of a company should tumble and go into the negative column as it did with General Motors and all of the investors money was wiped out with the company filing bankruptcy due to low sales. In the situation of an oil well if the market price should drop below the amount needed to be profitable you can turn the well off and wait until the market price returns. And it always cycles back around again to profitability in the oil business. You find after doing the math on the amount of money you have invested that over time before factoring in your tax benefits that oil investments generally have a very high rate of return.
________________________________________
Myth # 10 – If I invest in an oil well I will be stuck with it forever and won’t be able to sell my interest.
Truth – An interest in an oil well is sellable, because it is based on cash flow. Just like a stock is priced based on earnings times a multiple an oil interest is the same way. The longer you own an oil interest and the more established the production becomes the easy it is to sell, because it has a proven cash flow record just like a stock in a company would have.
________________________________________
Bonus Myth # 11 – They have found all of the oil there is to be found so why waste the time to drill?
Truth – It is believed that all of the big oil or easy oil has been found in the Continental United States excluding the offshore oil which is yet to be discovered. But big oil and new oil is expensive. Because it is in hard to get to places and it is much deeper than the oil found in the past it is much more expensive and therefore it would cost a private investor considerably more to invest in this type of oil exploration.But there are thousands of proven oil fields in the United States with oil reserves in place that have been sitting idle for many years. Fields that were abandoned when the price of oil had dropped and before new technology was invented to get the oil out with reduced costs and at today’s prices make the developmental drilling procedures of an existing oil field very profitable and cost effective in today’s market place.

We’ve all heard the phrase “you are what you eat.” When it comes to the brain, our most important organ, this idea that we become what we put into our bodies through nutrition takes on even greater meaning. The importance of brain nutrition becomes quite obvious when we consider a few key factors. The brain consumes a disproportionately large portion of the nutrients ingested by the body. The function of brain cells is heavily impacted by these nutrients available in the brain. The functioning of our brain cells determines how we function. Thus our mood, attention, memory, etc., are all functions of brain nutrition.The Greedy Brain – Why 40 Percent Of All Your Nutritional Intake Is Actually Brain NutritionOur intelligent body knows how important the brain is and so allocates its resources accordingly, allowing the brain to consume a disproportionately large portion of the nutrients we ingest. The brain weighs only 1 to 2 percent of your total body weight, but 20 percent of the air you breathe, 25 percent of your blood flow, 30 percent of the water you ingest, and 40 percent of the nutrition in your bloodstream is sent to be consumed by the brain. This means that 40 percent of your nutritional intake can be directly thought of as brain nutrition.Nutrition’s Powerful Influence Over Brain FunctionNutrients available to the brain have a huge impact on the healthy functioning of our brain cells or neurons. Nutrients affect neuronal function either directly, being metabolized without precursors, or indirectly, by affecting production of other substances in the brain that determine brain cell function.The billions of brain cells or neurons communicate via neurotransmitters — including serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine — that send signals through the brain’s complex of pathways. Brain function is determined in large part by the action of these chemical messengers. Losing mental agility in old age, for example, may result from the brain cells’ failing to communicate effectively rather than from cell death. Proper brain nutrition influences the production and action of neurotransmitters. For instance, research shows higher levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in lab rats that are fed blueberries, which are rich in antioxidants. Dopamine, in turn, is important for cognition, motivation, mood, attention, and learning.Other examples of nutrients which affect brain function include tyrosine, an amino acid found in protein which also supports the action of important neurotransmitters; the mineral magnesium, which can reduce hyperactivity and irritability; and omega-3 fatty acids, which can improve mood, attention, and alertness.Brain Nutrition Is Super Important To Your Well-being And Your LifeThus, nutrition has a huge impact on how we feel, think, and function. Our emotions, our memory, our ability to concentrate and accomplish tasks, and hence our lives are heavily impacted by what we put into our bodies, be it food, nutritional supplements, or drugs.Makes you think twice about eating that big mac or drinking that coke, doesn’t it? Makes you want to check the nutritional information of everything you buy at the grocery store, right? It makes you want to find out exactly what foods and supplements are beneficial for brain function and which are detrimental. You might think to yourself: what a drag! Well, the negative impact of ignorance on your brain is an even bigger drag. Knowledge is power. Now go and use brain nutrition to empower your mind and your life!

Background

Police funding has risen by £4.8 billion and 77 per cent (39 per cent in real terms) since 1997. However the days where forces have enjoyed such levels of funding are over.

Chief Constables and senior management recognize that the annual cycle of looking for efficiencies year-on-year is not sustainable, and will not address the cash shortfall in years to come.
Facing slower funding growth and real cash deficits in their budgets, the Police Service must adopt innovative strategies which generate the productivity and efficiency gains needed to deliver high quality policing to the public.

The step-change in performance required to meet this challenge will only be achieved if the police service fully embraces effective resource management and makes efficient and productive use of its technology, partnerships and people.

The finance function has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges and supporting Forces’ objectives economically and efficiently.

Challenge

Police Forces tend to nurture a divisional and departmental culture rather than a corporate one, with individual procurement activities that do not exploit economies of scale. This is in part the result of over a decade of devolving functions from the center to the.divisions.

In order to reduce costs, improve efficiency and mitigate against the threat of “top down” mandatory, centrally-driven initiatives, Police Forces need to set up a corporate back office and induce behavioral change. This change must involve compliance with a corporate culture rather than a series of silos running through the organization.

Developing a Best in Class Finance Function

Traditionally finance functions within Police Forces have focused on transactional processing with only limited support for management information and business decision support. With a renewed focus on efficiencies, there is now a pressing need for finance departments to transform in order to add greater value to the force but with minimal costs.

1) Aligning to Force Strategy

As Police Forces need finance to function, it is imperative that finance and operations are closely aligned. This collaboration can be very powerful and help deliver significant improvements to a Force, but in order to achieve this model, there are many barriers to overcome. Finance Directors must look at whether their Force is ready for this collaboration, but more importantly, they must consider whether the Force itself can survive without it.

Finance requires a clear vision that centers around its role as a balanced business partner. However to achieve this vision a huge effort is required from the bottom up to understand the significant complexity in underlying systems and processes and to devise a way forward that can work for that particular organization.

The success of any change management program is dependent on its execution. Change is difficult and costly to execute correctly, and often, Police Forces lack the relevant experience to achieve such change. Although finance directors are required to hold appropriate professional qualifications (as opposed to being former police officers as was the case a few years ago) many have progressed within the Public Sector with limited opportunities for learning from and interaction with best in class methodologies. In addition cultural issues around self-preservation can present barriers to change.

Whilst it is relatively easy to get the message of finance transformation across, securing commitment to embark on bold change can be tough. Business cases often lack the quality required to drive through change and even where they are of exceptional quality senior police officers often lack the commercial awareness to trust them.

2) Supporting Force Decisions

Many Finance Directors are keen to develop their finance functions. The challenge they face is convincing the rest of the Force that the finance function can add value – by devoting more time and effort to financial analysis and providing senior management with the tools to understand the financial implications of major strategic decisions.

Maintaining Financial Controls and Managing Risk

Sarbanes Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Basel II and Individual Capital Assessments (ICA) have all put financial controls and reporting under the spotlight in the private sector. This in turn is increasing the spotlight on financial controls in the public sector.

A ‘Best in Class’ Police Force finance function will not just have the minimum controls to meet the regulatory requirements but will evaluate how the legislation and regulations that the finance function are required to comply with, can be leveraged to provide value to the organization. Providing strategic information that will enable the force to meet its objectives is a key task for a leading finance function.

3) Value to the Force

The drive for development over the last decade or so, has moved decision making to the Divisions and has led to an increase in costs in the finance function. Through utilizing a number of initiatives in a program of transformation, a Force can leverage up to 40% of savings on the cost of finance together with improving the responsiveness of finance teams and the quality of financial information. These initiatives include:

Centralization

By centralizing the finance function, a Police Force can create centers of excellence where industry best practice can be developed and shared. This will not only re-empower the department, creating greater independence and objectivity in assessing projects and performance, but also lead to more consistent management information and a higher degree of control. A Police Force can also develop a business partner group to act as strategic liaisons to departments and divisions. The business partners would, for example, advise on how the departmental and divisional commanders can meet the budget in future months instead of merely advising that the budget has been missed for the previous month.

With the mundane number crunching being performed in a shared service center, finance professionals will find they now have time to act as business partners to divisions and departments and focus on the strategic issues.

The cultural impact on the departments and divisional commanders should not be underestimated. Commanders will be concerned that:

o Their budgets will be centralized
o Workloads would increase
o There will be limited access to finance individuals
o There will not be on site support

However, if the centralized shared service center is designed appropriately none of the above should apply. In fact from centralization under a best practice model, leaders should accrue the following benefits:

o Strategic advice provided by business partners
o Increased flexibility
o Improved management information
o Faster transactions
o Reduced number of unresolved queries
o Greater clarity on service and cost of provision
o Forum for finance to be strategically aligned to the needs of the Force

A Force that moves from a de-centralized to a centralized system should try and ensure that the finance function does not lose touch with the Chief Constable and Divisional Commanders. Forces need to have a robust business case for finance transformation combined with a governance structure that spans operational, tactical and strategic requirements. There is a risk that potential benefits of implementing such a change may not be realized if the program is not carefully managed. Investment is needed to create a successful centralized finance function. Typically the future potential benefits of greater visibility and control, consistent processes, standardized management information, economies of scale, long-term cost savings and an empowered group of proud finance professionals, should outweigh those initial costs.

To reduce the commercial, operational and capability risks, the finance functions can be completely outsourced or partially outsourced to third parties. This will provide guaranteed cost benefits and may provide the opportunity to leverage relationships with vendors that provide best practice processes.

Process Efficiencies

Typically for Police Forces the focus on development has developed a silo based culture with disparate processes. As a result significant opportunities exist for standardization and simplification of processes which provide scalability, reduce manual effort and deliver business benefit. From simply rationalizing processes, a force can typically accrue a 40% reduction in the number of processes. An example of this is the use of electronic bank statements instead of using the manual bank statement for bank reconciliation and accounts receivable processes. This would save considerable effort that is involved in analyzing the data, moving the data onto different spreadsheet and inputting the data into the financial systems.

Organizations that possess a silo operating model tend to have significant inefficiencies and duplication in their processes, for example in HR and Payroll. This is largely due to the teams involved meeting their own goals but not aligning to the corporate objectives of an organization. Police Forces have a number of independent teams that are reliant on one another for data with finance in departments, divisions and headquarters sending and receiving information from each other as well as from the rest of the Force. The silo model leads to ineffective data being received by the teams that then have to carry out additional work to obtain the information required.

Whilst the argument for development has been well made in the context of moving decision making closer to operational service delivery, the added cost in terms of resources, duplication and misaligned processes has rarely featured in the debate. In the current financial climate these costs need to be recognized.

Culture

Within transactional processes, a leading finance function will set up targets for staff members on a daily basis. This target setting is an element of the metric based culture that leading finance functions develop. If the appropriate metrics of productivity and quality are applied and when these targets are challenging but not impossible, this is proven to result in improvements to productivity and quality.

A ‘Best in Class’ finance function in Police Forces will have a service focused culture, with the primary objectives of providing a high level of satisfaction for its customers (departments, divisions, employees & suppliers). A ‘Best in Class’ finance function will measure customer satisfaction on a timely basis through a metric based approach. This will be combined with a team wide focus on process improvement, with process owners, that will not necessarily be the team leads, owning force-wide improvement to each of the finance processes.

Organizational Improvements

Organizational structures within Police Forces are typically made up of supervisors leading teams of one to four team members. Through centralizing and consolidating the finance function, an opportunity exists to increase the span of control to best practice levels of 6 to 8 team members to one team lead / supervisor. By adjusting the organizational structure and increasing the span of control, Police Forces can accrue significant cashable benefit from a reduction in the number of team leads and team leads can accrue better management experience from managing larger teams.

Technology Enabled Improvements

There are a significant number of technology improvements that a Police Force could implement to help develop a ‘Best in Class’ finance function.

These include:

A) Scanning and workflow

Through adopting a scanning and workflow solution to replace manual processes, improved visibility, transparency and efficiencies can be reaped.

B) Call logging, tracking and workflow tool

Police Forces generally have a number of individuals responding to internal and supplier queries. These queries are neither logged nor tracked. The consequence of this is dual:

o Queries consume considerable effort within a particular finance team. There is a high risk of duplicated effort from the lack of logging of queries. For example, a query could be responded to for 30 minutes by person A in the finance team. Due to this query not being logged, if the individual that raised the query called up again and spoke to a different person then just for one additional question, this could take up to 20 minutes to ensure that the background was appropriately explained.

o Queries can have numerous interfaces with the business. An unresolved query can be responded against by up to four separate teams with considerable delay in providing a clear answer for the supplier.

The implementation of a call logging, tracking and workflow tool to document, measure and close internal and supplier queries combined with the set up of a central queries team, would significantly reduce the effort involved in responding to queries within the finance departments and divisions, as well as within the actual divisions and departments, and procurement.

C) Database solution

Throughout finance departments there are a significant number of spreadsheets utilized prior to input into the financial system. There is a tendency to transfer information manually from one spreadsheet to another to meet the needs of different teams.

Replacing the spreadsheets with a database solution would rationalize the number of inputs and lead to effort savings for the front line Police Officers as well as Police Staff.

D) Customize reports

In obtaining management information from the financial systems, police staff run a series of reports, import these into excel, use lookups to match the data and implement pivots to illustrate the data as required. There is significant manual effort that is involved in carrying out this work. Through customizing reports the outputs from the financial system can be set up to provide the data in the formats required through the click of a button. This would have the benefit of reduced effort and improved motivation for team members that previously carried out these mundane tasks.

In designing, procuring and implementing new technology enabling tools, a Police Force will face a number of challenges including investment approval; IT capacity; capability; and procurement.

These challenges can be mitigated through partnering with a third party service company with whom the investment can be shared, the skills can be provided and the procurement cycle can be minimized.

Conclusion

It is clear that cultural, process and technology change is required if police forces are to deliver both sustainable efficiencies and high quality services. In an environment where for the first time forces face real cash deficits and face having to reduce police officer and support staff numbers whilst maintaining current performance levels the current finance delivery models requires new thinking.

While there a number of barriers to be overcome in achieving a best in class finance function, it won’t be long before such a decision becomes mandatory. Those who are ahead of the curve will inevitably find themselves in a stronger position.