The modern energy industry relies on an array of experts — scientific, technical, and business specialists who’ve made the industry one of the world’s most profitable even as its resource become more expensive.

That expertise is essential — because today the energy industry is beset by complexity on all sides.

Regulators have proven quick to legislate how companies can do business. Markets soar and plummet on little more than analyst speculation. And talent pools are shrinking as a generation of experts prepares to retire and schools produce fewer scientists to replace them.

But there’s reason to maintain high expectations. After all, if any business has proven adept at finding new resources and adapting to new conditions, it’s the energy industry.

Video is helping energy companies make their expertise more agile — capturing innovations in extraction, manufacturing, refining, and distribution, preserving institutional knowledge, and sharing ideas and information vital to sustaining ROI even while resources fall and regulations mount.

So how are modern energy companies using video today?

Demonstrating and Reviewing Processes
Video makes it easy to record and share production processes in action, even those that take place on remote drilling platforms or offshore wind farms. Such recordings make it easy to capture regulatory or safety protocols in action, document processes and identify issues for continuous improvement, or simply monitor ongoing activities in these important investments.

Preserving and Sharing Expertise
For an industry often at the forefront of chemical and geographical research — not to mention regulatory adaptation, geopolitical negotiation, and enhanced, “smart grid” distribution — preserving the knowledge of internal experts has become essential to maintaining a competitive advantage. Video is a simple solution to curating that wisdom — so it can be referenced and utilized even after the expert leaves.

Better Equipping Field Technicians
Whether it’s at the extraction site or on the last mile of distribution, energy companies rely heavily on the capabilities of their teams in the field to make sure everything works as it should. Video provides field team members both with a simple way to document and share issues — with visual clarity that text reports can’t match — as well as a means to quickly consume on-demand training while on-location — helping to reduce errors by allowing them to literally see each step as they go.

Enhance and Scale Employee Training
As processes become more intricate and just about every role more complicated, delivering regular, detailed, and accessible employee training has become essential for most energy companies. Video makes it easy to build and share a library of training materials. There’s virtually no limit to what video-based employee training can teach — already Panopto customers use video to train on compliance requirements from HR, safety best practices, role-specific skills training, benefits planning, and almost anything else.

Social Knowledge Sharing
Often bottom-line results for energy companies depend on how well their people can apply sophisticated science to the chaos of the physical world. With video-based social learning, subject matter experts can quickly record and share insights right from their webcams, providing others in the organization with details that demystify complicated regulations, geopolitical shifts and resulting business environments, and applications for technical and scientific advances that may lead to even more valuable opportunities.

Customer & Stakeholder Communications
Between customers, partners, regulatory agencies, and local governments sharing the right messages in the right ways can be the difference between whether new projects move forward or find themselves stalled. Video can help. According to Forrester Research, people are 75% more likely to watch a video than read an email — meaning even a simple corporate communications video recording can often get your message across better than even the best websites or brochures.

A Searchable, Secure Video Library
No matter how any given energy company uses video most often, in the end, nearly every one creates a robust library of video files in the process. Panopto is the only video platform that integrates best-of-breed recording and webcasting with a secure video library and a unique video search engine that makes finding information inside your videos as easy as searching for content within email and documents.

Don’t Miss Out!

In our latest white paper, A Competitive Spark: 7 Ways Today’s Energy Industry Uses Video, we’ll look into how video is helping energy companies make their expertise more agile — capturing innovations in extraction, manufacturing, refining, and distribution, preserving institutional knowledge, and sharing ideas and information vital to sustaining ROI and building competitive advantages even while resources fall and regulations mount.