Journey towards Route-Less Operations – Part 2

This is a continuation of my conversation with Liz Green, Permian Business Partner and Pete Owens, IT Manager and Field Technology. They drove the implementation of JOYN in their organization, a top 50 E&P company operating out of the Permian Basin and South Texas regions. (Read Part 1 here: https://www.sevenlakes.com/blog/journey-towards-routeless-operations-part1/

*Please note that the customer names have been masked upon request. Our customer is willing and open to having a one on one conversation if you would like to pursue JOYN platform for your field.

Since the implementation, have you gone back to see how the field is using the JOYN app and what they are getting out of the app?

Pete: Yes, I think so. We had wins on the operator side as well as on the FDG side. This included saving time for people that were duplicating tank levels and being able to carry forward a couple tops. We built on these initial benefits to get them excited.

The top management saw the value of JOYN FSM much clearer. One of the things John (who heads our Operations and the Advanced Analytics and Emerging Technology Group) mentioned was a real-time well review. He would attend meetings where they would conduct well review on a route area every three months. People would discuss three things to do, every meeting, and they’d follow up on it in the next meetings.

Liz: Leveraging our night operators is another benefit of JOYN FSM.

We have night operators that respond to any kind of alarms that go off overnight. The vision here is to enable the field superintendents to shuffle the tasks that can be done by these technicians in the night time. This would free up the time for lease operators, who would arrive in the morning, and allow them to focus on high priority tasks in the day time.

The other benefit of JOYN FSM is the feasibility of level loading. For example, if you have three of you five workers training for something, the other two workers would just run their own routes the entire day. Instead, with JOYN2, you can redirect these two workers to the high priority tasks, get the work done, and let the lower priority items slide till the next day.

I imagine that the prioritization and the scoring of the tasks being allocated are different for each field. What are your observations using the product when you go through this exercise in different fields?

Pete: The optimization foremen have the ability to say what’s important. They’re people that we went back and forth with. We tried to figure out if we needed a technologist person, because, at times, we had issues that stuck for a long time. Then we decided that we needed foremen, as these people knew the field and the assets. They knew what was important and what it was like to be working out there. For example, they knew things such as this well makes a lot of production but maybe it costs a lot too. And it might not be the best to go to. Hence these foremen had the capability to adjust scores.

They knew when they had to rerun sequences and reassign things to people. We’ve tried to automate these tasks, but as you know, the oil field is a living breathing thing by itself. And a well might not be the same every day. We needed capable people to take charge in such situations.

With all this investment of data coming together and people signing on, what are some things you need to start showing, in terms of behavior or production, as you check the boxes?

Pete: The ultimate goal is to make more money, to cut the costs on things that are not important. Originally, John had put a quadrant item together which showed GPS data, and calculated how much time we were spending in one field – which was 60 percent. It also calculated the amount being spent on activities.

Equipped with this knowledge, we tried to get people to the right places to make more money, save time and be efficient. We have engineers talking about using the seven-day average production with cash flow to adjust scoring matrices.

Using this information, we’d be able to guide more people to the important areas, in the future.  We’ve got the tools in place and we are getting the groundwork set for the things we can do in the future. The next part is to figure out how to pull all this data and how to use these data points.

That was my conversation with Liz and Pete. 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 more about going routeless through JOYN here: https://www.sevenlakes.com/solutions/joyn-2

Here is a demo of our product: