4 Ways of Managing your Oilfield Operations

There are a few different ways how you can manage and track your field operations. Every company chooses which one to use depending on its size, types of operations, budget, digital maturity level and others. In this article I would like to overview those productivity tools and discuss a balanced approach to using them together applicable to a modern-day Oilfield Service companies, and other field operations businesses as well. These productivity tools are whiteboards, Excel, and Operations Management System (OMS). I will look at each case separately and then discuss how they could be blended in our productivity routines. So, let’s get started.

Probably the most popular thing in any office space is a whiteboard. Whiteboards are easy to maintain, you just need an eraser to clean it for the next use. Also, you could use magnets to pin additional information on a piece of paper or card. You could easily personalize whiteboards with hundreds of tiny add-ons you can get from Amazon. So, whiteboards are easy to use, intuitive, allow for any creativity that could be done with few magnet pins and markers, and multipurpose. “Multipurpose” may be the most powerful thing about whiteboards that keeps them around in classrooms, offices, and other workspaces.

From the oilfield operations perspective, whiteboards, for example, are used to keep daily field services, shop repairs, and maintenance schedules amid other processes. This is how things are done in most oilfield service companies, because all information is in front of you, so it is easy to visualize and brainstorm. However, you try to maintain things running that way, any information on the board is not permanent. Sooner or later new space will be required at the cost of old information being erased. And overtime, whiteboards become less of a white and more of different color stains.

Excel is the great application that could be used for almost any purpose one can think of. With all the functions, macros, VBA, lookups, pivots, power queries, you can build sophisticated solutions for your business processes. However, there are limitations of application cases which depend on complexity of processes, complexity of data and volume of information. In other word if you have sophisticated processes, your data require metadata, and you often require increasing your data storage capacity, then you need to consider another class of solutions than just Excel.

Given all available capabilities, yet I personally consider developing complex asset tracking, logistics, warehouse, shop repairs, and other operational flows as a serious challenge in Excel applications. However, for the sake of fairness, if you run small business, Excel is the great tool to use, and mastering, all Excel functions must be prioritized.

If you run more complex operations, for example, in oilfield rentals, then OMS systems, such as riger®, is the way to go. Such systems allow you to assess, manage and optimize business processes, operations risk, safety, environment and operating performance. Generally speaking they help you boost your business’s efficiency. Using only Excel to manage your rentals is not a proper solution, and this is not just an anti-advertising statement, but rather comes from a deep understanding of how things really work. Simply, spelling errors and shortcomings of multi-user work in Excel could cause big issues and slow down the whole business. In today complicated economy burdened with political crisis and world-wide pandemic of 2020, having inefficient operations due to problematic business applications that supposed to make life easier but don’t is the last thing you want to wrap your head around, right?

Still if abandoning Excel is not an option, you can surely benefit from integrating Excel with an OMS of your choice. So, let us discuss different scenarios when and how Excel and an OMS solution can be used together. We will take riger® integration with Excel as an example.

Let us say you have a long list of rental equipment stored in Excel on your local PC or OneDrive, this really does not matter right now. The point is to transfer that long list of your rental equipment to riger®. Obviously, re-entering the whole list through the OMS data entry interface is not the proper way to do this. It is much better to have that list of equipment, whether you really store everything in Excel or you are transferring them from your accounting software, imported to OMS from Excel files. With a click of a button you just choose the right Excel file and all information is transferred to OMS with no manual entry. In the same manner, you could import list of clients, vendors, employees, contacts, locations, trucks, etc. Additionally, riger® provides ready templates you can use to import your data. Don’t you find it’s convenient? Yeah, I think so too.

There is also an extensive list of things you can export from riger^® to Excel. Let us assume, that you need to prepare monthly revenue report by clients or a utilization report of all your rental units and send it to your tops. In riger^® this is done in a very simple manner, you generate the report you need, hit the Excel button, save the downloaded file where you need, and attach it to the email to your boss. Also, this whole process could be automated and set up to be repeated on a timely basis. Another example could be exporting riger^® data to the QuickBooks or any other third-party software. You need to export a flat file from riger^®, figure out mapping, download the file from riger^®, and import it to the other application.

Overall, those who use Excel will find no issues to switch to riger^® and still leverage Excel for expanded capabilities. Enabled functionality makes it simple to import any data to riger^® via Excel. Also, Excel integration in riger^® allows connecting with other applications and transferring data as required as well as connecting with other people inside or outside your organization and sending them Excel reports or other statements.

Afterall, there is no wrong way of how you choose to work if the way you chose works just fine for you. And if you do not practice it already, in my opinion, having a balanced approach would allow to leverage all the advantages of whiteboards, Excel and an OMS. Using right tool for the right moment is the key to quality and success in our fields.