Software Toolbox Technical Blog

In today’s fast-evolving oil and gas industry, accurate and reliable Electronic Flow Measurement (EFM) data is critical for custody transfer, regulatory compliance, and optimizing production. Yet accessing and managing that data, locked inside flow computers and RTUs can be a complex challenge.

In this blog, you’ll discover how Software Toolbox’s EFM Solutions simplify integration, ensure data reliability, and leverage open standards to seamlessly connect control systems, SCADA platforms, historians, accounting systems, and enterprise infrastructure, unlocking the full value of your flow measurement data.

On June 26, 2025, Software Toolbox hosted a live panel discussion that brought together three industry subject matter experts. They explored how organizations can unify data across legacy and modern systems, securely, efficiently, and without unnecessary disruption. In addition, they discussed in depth what it really takes to create a common data framework that’s not just effective, but scalable and future ready.

From Silos to Insights: What You Need to Know

This blog highlights the key takeaways, where the panel unpacked seven critical areas to focus on when closing data gaps across operations. You’ll discover the most common challenges companies face, why aligning technology with business goals is essential, and how open, standards-based solutions can bridge the gap between old and new, without the high costs and disruption of rip-and-replace approaches.

In the oil and gas industry, data drives everything—from production optimization to regulatory compliance and remote asset management. But in an environment with geographically dispersed assets, legacy equipment, and too often limited network bandwidth, secure data exchange is far from simple. 

To stay competitive and compliant, oil and gas operators must bridge the gap between edge devices to control and enterprise systems—safely, reliably, and in real time.

Oil and gas is a complex, high-risk, high-reward industry affected by factors like operational challenges, frequent system configuration change, buying/selling of field assets, environmental risks, technological integration, highly variable demand and market-based pricing, and safety concerns. It involves high capital investment, complex distribution networks, and diverse regulatory requirements. With the ongoing shift towards digital transformation strategies and smart manufacturing revolving around Industry 4.0, companies must adapt while ensuring efficiency, profitability, and compliance.

In this blog I’ll talk about the challenges our clients in this space tell us they face, how our solutions address them, and share resources including success stories to learn more.

Streamline Operations, Improve Visibility, Enable Compliance, and Drive Success

In the highly regulated and fast-paced oil and gas industry, leveraging real-time, secure data is crucial for improving operational efficiency, ensuring safety, and meeting regulatory compliance standards. Software Toolbox delivers software solutions designed to enable data integration that is a must for the applications you use to monitor, manage, streamline and optimize operations across all sectors of the oil and gas value chain. Our solutions deliver the critical data you need, whether you're in upstream exploration, midstream pipeline management, or downstream refining.

Read the rest of the blog to learn how we can help drive your operations forward.

When you hear "EFM data", you probably think of well-known Oil & Gas devices like ABB TotalFlow, Fisher ROC, or OMNI Flow and their native protocols, or perhaps Enron Modbus. However, the Oil & Gas industry is quickly embracing the DNP3 protocol for its speed and security in pipeline monitoring.

Current generation Emerson devices, like the FB1000 and FB2000 Series Flow Computers or FB3000 RTUs, support secure DNP3, which is the recommended protocol by Emerson. But how can you extract both real-time data as well as EFM alarm, event and flow history data from them? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! 

In this blog, you’ll learn about the powerful capabilities of the DNP3 protocol and how you can use the TOP Server DNP3 Driver and Software Toolbox EFM Exporter for Emerson FB Automation Platform together to efficiently and accurately provide automated, scheduled liquid and gas real-time and accounting data retrieval from your Emerson Devices and export that EFM data to the FLOWCAL CFX format.

If you're reading this post, you're more than likely working in the oil and gas industry, and you probably have flow computers and devices from different vendors storing historical EFM (Electronic Flow Measurement) data.  And, if your company is anything like the other companies in that industry, you use that EFM data for analysis, custody transfer and production optimization using one of the common EFM flow measurement analysis packages such as Flow-Cal, Quorum PGAS or even CSV or SQL.

In this blog post, I'll cover the video how-to resources available to help you get started using our EFM Suite for TOP Server to poll and export collected EFM data from various flow computers for Wonderware applications.

If you're in the oil and gas industry, you're aware that, flow computers and devices from different vendors store historical EFM (Electronic Flow Measurement) data that is used for analysis, custody transfer and production optimization.  To that end, oil and gas companies use several EFM flow measurement analysis packages such as Flow-Cal, Quorum PGAS or even CSV or SQL to store and analyze that collected EFM data.

In this video blog, I'll show you how to get started using our EFM Exporter plug-in for TOP Server to poll and export collected EFM data from various flow computers for Wonderware applications.