PFM Reports

PFM LLC
Bellaire, TX USA

The PFM Reports application was developed by River City Software Development LLC for its client, PFM LLC. PFM LLC was founded in 1989 and has more than 500 employees. It is a full-service professional petroleum land company that provides land support for the oil and gas industry. Its expertise is in oil and gas leasing, mineral title searching, pipeline right-of-way acquisition, building run sheets and abstracts, title curative and acquisition/divestiture projects.

Report View definition screen with associated tags.

PFM Reports is a brand-new application which is used internally by PFM field managers, crew chiefs and regular staff. It serves as a repository for users to input land information. This information includes GeoID, legal description, size, abstract, etc. The application categorizes tracts of land under different projects so field managers and administrators can assign work appropriately. The Report screen also allows users to define additional views, associate tags, and create formulas.

A typical user, upon logging into the application, chooses a project to work on. Under each project, there is a list of land tracts where users input mineral divisions based on ownership information. Each tract of land can have a number of mineral owners; and each mineral owner might be a legal entity that further branches out into more parties. The system is also used to calculate ownership percentage and bonus incentives for parties signing up as lessees.

Custom calculate function incorporated on EditTract page.

The Report users' role is to define various views for each uploaded Rich Text report template. Report users create and associate tags for each view in order to build a dynamic report later. Each tag describes a particular component on the report, gives a default value, and establishes a formula for its calculation.

Application size and scope

The PFM Reports application accesses one SQL Server database. The application consists of 60 tables, the largest of which is the Mineral table, which holds over 6,000 records. There are 120 web pages. Approximately 20 users process 250 transactions per month.

The project

The project took one calendar year to implement using two full-time developers. The Iron Speed Designer portion of the project took two months to complete.

Code extensions and customizations

We wrote about 800 lines of custom code. These include:

	Audit Trails on Inserting/Updating.
	Populating Dropdown Items.
	Create Custom WhereClause.
	Override Sign-in Control to store more user information.
	Override clicking of Edit icon to store session variable.
	Override Application wide Page_onLoad function.

Show different tracts of land based on user selected project.

It took us about six weeks to write our code customizations. We did not use any third-party components.

Page layout customizations

We also made the following page customizations:

	Attached a calculate function to populate a field within the Edit Record control.
	Re-position fields on extremely long pages to make page more readable and data entry easier.
	Override some LargeListSelector pages to pull appropriate records for user selection.
	Create a new page for users to select a project.

Iron Speed Designer impact

I believe that by using Iron Speed Designer, we saved three and a half months in development time and $56,000. Without Iron Speed Developer, the project would have taken almost a year and a half!

Based on the time required to market, and the need to have a uniform user interface, the project wouldn't have been feasible without Iron Speed Designer.

Next steps

The future plan for the PFM Reports application is to develop an upload mechanism so users can upload report templates and then use them to define associated views. A second step is to construct a Build Lease interface so that the application becomes a commercial lease printer application using stored land, party, ownership and bonus information to populate those necessary fields.

Plans to extend the application will require additional branch managers and staff members to be involved in the deployment of this project.

About the developer

Jim Murphy is the owner and Chief Application Designer and Developer for River City Software Development LLC. He has been programming professionally for more than 16 years in fields that include Health Care, Insurance, Banking/Lending, Real Estate, Oil & Gas, Manufacturing, and Government. Jim was an early adopter of Iron Speed Designer and worked closely with Iron Speed Technical Engineers while the product was maturing. Jim's major strengths are in Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, C#, Visual Basic .NET, XML, and Reporting.