DIGITIZING GREASEBOOKS FOR OILFIELD MOBILITY
My name is Sowmya Murthy, and I am the Chief Customer Officer at Seven Lakes. Last year at EVOLVE 2019, we explored many Pump by Exception related topics such as Dynamic Routing, Field Service, Mobility, and AI. This is a short extract from my conversation with our JOYN FDG customer champion from a large Permian-focused E&P company that has just gone live with Field Data Gathering and Analytics.
*Please note that the customer name has been masked upon request. Our customer is willing to have a one on one conversation if JOYN is the right fit for your company.
A year ago, you had signed on FDG Analytics while your role was still being defined. Today, you are fully live in three of your fields. This has been an immense change and progress in a short period of time. So, what was going on in your head when you were preparing to come up here and speak with the JOYN community?
Kate: It’s amazing to realize how much work we’ve done in the last year. It’s been quick and slow at the same time. It’s always hard pushing change management with certain users. The Seven Lakes team has helped a lot in managing some of the scenarios that we have dealt with.
What was driving the “Digitizing Grease Books” in your company?
Kate: Before we went live with this, we analyzed the headcount we would require in our company for the next ten years. We thought that if we continued to increase the production at the rate that we’re increasing, our headcount needed to rise at a certain rate in the next 10 years. And we cannot afford to hire that many people. In Midland, we have neither the workforce nor the infrastructure available for this.
At the same time, we also got feedback from our shareholders that we needed more free cash flow and that we need to be cost-cautious. So, we knew we needed to transform several things in the company, especially on how we operate the field.
We evaluated the tasks of the lease operators. We realized that 30 percent of their time was spent on data entry. So, the first thing we wanted to do was to reduce that time. We thought about how we could repurpose their time and enable them to bring value to the company.
We engaged some vendors in a disconnected pilot in one of our offices. We took a data dump, put it in the system and had our people run some time trials on their routes.
We had rolled out applications before, that our field didn’t like and hence they didn’t use it. So, we wanted to take our application to the field and get some feedback. We wanted to know if it made sense for them, if it was intuitive and if they could work with it.
This was a part of the purpose of our disconnected pilot to digitize greasebooks (without integration to source systems), and the other part was to get some rough estimates on our time savings to justify the project. We then signed the contract and decided to move forward with Seven Lakes in October last year. We’ve been going from office to office since then.
For our first office, we went live with one form and area at a time. We engaged with the field folks, asking them if they liked it if we needed to change something, etc. We then moved forward with four foremen areas, and then kept going. Yesterday, we did our whole Northwest office, which was 65 guys at a time.
Can you tell us more about the conversations you had with the leadership and the field to keep the momentum in the change?
Kate: During the course of this change, I’d go meet the super users in all the offices once a week and let them know what I’d been working on. I’d take feedback from them on this change. This collaboration made them feel included, like, they were a part of this change. We didn’t try to push this application on them saying, “Here you go. We made this application for you.” Even if they didn’t really have much feedback to provide initially, they knew they could come back to us with any changes later.
Our older software was very rigid and we couldn’t add or change attributes. Now, we are giving them the option to do that.
We also kept the management involved by evaluating the numbers after we went live. We tried to discern if our application was actually working and if we could see the time savings that we predicted in our pilot.
We got the numbers to show to the management committee that the field operators were either saving time or doing better things with that time. We analyzed the inventory numbers and the maintenance tax and found that the operators were spending less time on maintenance than they used to. One week into going live we see a 50 percent increase in the number of parts they’re pulling out, which is a huge plus point. And we’re constantly evaluating these numbers.
That was my conversation with Kate. If you have any comments or queries do not hesitate to reach out. I’ll be posting more conversations soon
In the meantime, you can learn how to digitize your Greasebooks through JOYN FDG here: https://www.sevenlakes.com/solutions/fdg/
Here is a demo of our product:
