Date of case study: 10/2020
Industry of business: Software development for subsea survey and inspection
Established: 2001 (as VisualSoft Ltd)
LightningChart solution: XY and 3D charts

Forum Energy Technologies, Inc.

Forum Energy Technologies, created almost 10 years ago, with the merger of five companies, is a global oilfield products company, serving in the drilling, subsea, completions, production and infrastructure sectors of the oil and gas industry. Forum continues to grow organically and through measured acquisition. Forum’s headquarters are in Houston, Texas, but they have manufacturing and distribution facilities located all around the world.

Forum operates in the three reporting segments: Drilling & Downhole, Completions and Production. The company’s Drilling and Downhole segment includes their Subsea products, Completions segment includes Stimulation & Intervention and Coiled Tubing products, and Production segment their Valves product lines.

VisualSoft – Software and Control System Solutions

VisualSoft is a market leading provider of Digital Video and Data Acquisition and processing systems for survey and inspection of underwater assets. They were the first company to introduce Digital Video into the offshore oil and gas industry and since then have led the way in the introduction of new digital video formats into the subsea market allowing their customers to take advantage of the best available video quality for the least amount of data overhead.

VisualSoft’s team of software developers continuously strives to provide the most innovative, robust and user-oriented products which are valued worldwide by their diverse spectrum of customers. (Source: VisualSoft website)

Picture 1. Visual Data Display

How LightningChart is helping FET?

LightningChart’s XY and 3D charts are being used in several of their applications. The usage ranges from the real-time displays of the seabed to data processing displays showing multiple views of offshore survey data. These include longitudinal, side views, time slices, 3D views and pipe sections.

Initially Forum was looking for a charting tool for plotting 2D graphs, but the more they investigated the samples of LightningChart, and read through the documentation, the more it became apparent that LightningChart would also be very useful for enhancing their application’s 3D views. They also noticed that features such as Zoom Bar chart control would improve the user’s experience of their product.

Forum found that the samples, along with the code, helped them enormously in the early stages of the assessment and with the well documented manual they were quickly able to demo the features.

Picture 2. VisualDataLogger-3D seabed section

LightningChart brings benefits and saves resources

Mark Hughes, Software Development Manager, from Forum Energy Technologies states that LightningChart has been very easy to use and configure. He appreciates quality documentation and excellent support. Mark says that the flexibility of LightningChart enables that the charts can be used for a multitude of data displays.

When he initially started looking at LightningChart during the trial period, Mark had a couple of queries. The queries were mostly about how their applications would benefit using LightningChart and how could LightningChart as a solution replace their existing charts. Mark really valued the Support Team’s detailed and helpful response, which pushed the decision forward. Since then, Mark says that any issues or questions have been answered very quickly and informatively with well described solutions and in some cases code examples.

“It’s definitely been a huge benefit in time and human resources to use LightningChart, otherwise to upgrade all our existing charts and 3D displays would have consumed a significant amount of time”, says Mark. He appreciates that LightningChart uses the latest technology and trusts that it is going to be maintained well: “Something a small development team like ourselves do not have time for”, he ends.