10 Must-Ask Questions while evaluating Oil & Gas Field Service Management Software
Over the last few weeks, I have been running an Online Open Office every Thursday. During this time, I have met scores of prospects and customers interested in JOYN – our Field Service Management product for the Oil and Gas industry. I notice most oilfield personnel and leaders have very similar queries. Here is a list of 10 questions I am frequently asked, and ones I recommend you should ask too while evaluating any Oil & Gas Field Service Management software or solution. I am also plugging in my response.
Q. Can your E&P Field Service Management product integrate SCADA alarms to kick off tasks?
A: Yes, you can integrate critical SCADA alarms to JOYN to kick off tasks. This is a popular use case – especially for critical actionable tasks that you want to separate from what may often be a noisy SCADA system full of the low, medium, and high alerts that are delivered via text messages.
Q: How do you dynamically route field personnel if we have fixed routes setup?
A: JOYN helps you combine your existing routes or hand-picked pads/batteries into “Areas” that have teams of lease operators, technicians, vendors, etc. assigned to these them. The routing engine will then figure out the most optimal route given various input parameters.
Q: How does the task management engine decide the route? What are the input parameters?
A: JOYN takes into account the assignee’s skills, certifications, location, availability along with the task’s priority score, location, skills/certification requirements, and the expected goal. The expected goal can be a balance between competing goals of reducing travel time, prioritizing the highest score tasks, and balancing workload amongst field users.
Q: Can the routing engine run on a schedule?
A: Yes, JOYN’s routing engine can be run on a schedule throughout the day and you can even configure the input parameters for shift changes such as weekends where you may need to distribute tasks differently depending on the number of resources you have.
Q: Can we share only the required information when onboarding field service vendors to JOYN?
A: Absolutely! Vendors will only be able to see their own tasks both on the web portal and on the mobile app.
Q: As a foreman, I don’t like to micromanage the routine stuff. Can I allow my guys to manage/trade/assign each other routine tasks?
A: Yes – it’s a simple configuration checkbox that allows you to handpick which types of jobs/tasks you want to allow your team to self-manage.
Q: What happens if there is no internet in the field?
A: The JOYN app works offline and stores everything locally on the mobile device. The moment the user enters an area of connectivity, all local data will sync up to the JOYN cloud and any new data will be downloaded.
Can I broadcast tasks to an entire team and assign it on a first-come-first-serve basis; kind of like calling an Uber?
Yes – absolutely. This is a common use case in scenarios where the task is of high priority and the closest person may already be busy and unavailable on another high priority task so the best available person is able to respond and the rest of the team is informed of the user who has picked up the task.
Q: What if I have a task that is dependent on a predecessor task? Can I be informed of that?
A: Of course – JOYN will always show you the predecessor task’s status as part of your assigned task’s details. This way you will know when your task is ready. In addition, JOYN will also send you a notification when any predecessor tasks have been completed.
We’ve got some environmental regulations which require us to perform inspections every month on our assets. Can JOYN handle this and preserve the relationship between the tasks?
Yes sir! JOYN’s linked tasks feature allows kicking off the repair task directly from the inspection task and preserve this linkage on both sides so the mobile and administrative users can clearly see when any issues and their resulting repairs are completed.
Let me know if you have more queries on JOYN Field Service Management. I’ll love to add them to the list above as they come by. You can also join me for a 1-1 conversation during my Open Office hours – link here.
