Digital dispatching and scheduling oilfield jobs

There is no doubt that dispatching is one of those jobs that is directly associated with high responsibility, constant interaction with team members from all other departments of the company and efficient use of available resources. So, being in the center of all these actions and making multiple important decisions on a daily basis can be, and usually is highly stressful.
One of the core goals of riger^® is to be the right tool for the dispatcher by allowing to easily manage every single aspect of a job that can, in any way, be associated with dispatching – be it the availability of resources, deploying/returning equipment, service provision, repairs, inspections, maintenance, personnel management, and so on…

Equipment/Inventory Availability

This is a topic that has a very high level of importance for dispatching. Provide the dispatcher with correct and up-to-date information about equipment and/or personnel availability, and there will be no need to spend (waste) time on trying to understand what’s on hand at any moment in time. riger^® offers a wide range of such tools that provide valuable information with just the right amount of details needed.

Here are just a few examples:

• The Availability dashboard – the homepage of riger^® (default configuration). It’s a dynamic dashboard that shows the equipment availability based on the selected date (current – by default). So questions like – “How many pieces of a particular equipment are available for dispatch and in which shop”, “What Unit numbers are deployed to a particular location”, “Which units are under repairs” and so on are all already answered by this dashboard. It contains multiple filters that allow to narrow down the search. It also has sub-pages, which, when selected, will either show information about Rental Units (RU), more detailed information about individual Unit Numbers (UN), or even consumables (Parts)
• The Location History Dashboard – another powerful and dynamic dashboard with many filters that provides information by different locations – what equipment has been deployed, when, and for which client. What documents were involved in the chain and so on. Spoiler – it also allows to manipulate all the documents from within…
• The Location Report – another very handy tool for the dispatcher that is there to provide information about what equipment is at a particular location on a selected date (current – by default). In other words, it allows to easily understand what exactly is at the client site to base off of and perform additional operations if needed
• The Dispatch RU dashboard – another dynamic dashboard, specifically focused on providing information about item availability for a week-long window. It will display the status information (available, deployed, etc.) about Rental Units with their corresponding Unit Numbers for the current day, past two and next 4 days which will add more clarity on how to organize the dispatching operations

Equipment Deployment/Return and Service Provision

For the movement of the individual items and for service provision riger^® uses Rental and Field Tickets. Rental Tickets are geared towards rental operations – those start and stop rental periods – while Field Tickets are intended to be used for oilfield services.

There are different types of Rental Tickets – each intended to perform a specific action:

• Delivery – used to deliver equipment to client location
• Return – used to return equipment from client location
• Service – used for service provision
• Maintenance – used to perform equipment maintenance based on maintenance templates

Field Tickets, on the other hand, do not have types and do not incorporate the functionality to work with rental equipment. Main focus is on service with possible addition of consumables needed for the services.
The dispatcher has the ability create as many tickets as needed and in any combination that is necessary – there is no limitation.
It is worth mentioning that all tickets that belong to one job will be created under one RSA document, which in riger^® is an oilfield job.

Field Technician Dispatch

Having current information about Field Technicians’ availability is no less important than the equipment availability information. Being able to schedule jobs with the right Field Technician who is fit for the job will ensure quality of service and client satisfaction.

As it was the case with equipment availability, there are several tools in riger^® that provide information about field personnel, for example:

• Dispatch FT dashboard – a sub-page of the home screen (Availability dashboard). This is a dynamic dashboard that will show availability and historical information about each Field Technician/Supervisor – with the tickets associated with them (which can be accessed directly from within the dashboard)
• Field Technician Calendar – a calendar that will show the availability information for the Field Tech and will also allow to add days off or injured days, and so on
• Skills/Qualifications and Certificates – create a “personnel file” for each Field Technician to indicate the skills and qualification s/he has which might be required for certain types of jobs. Also, add certification information with expiry dates, if applicable. This information will then be available in different reports.
• Billable/Payable hours – every ticket contains fields that can be used to enter the Billable/Payable/Overtime/Per Diem and Bonus hours spent on the assigned job. This will allow to track time for each Field Tech and use that information in Reports, Payroll calculation, etc. It is also possible to add the same information about crew members to any ticket.

Job Schedules

Having recurring tasks automated saves a lot of time, and for a dispatcher it can be very helpful to be able to schedule recurring services. The riger^® software has a scheduling mechanism that allows creating schedules and automating tasks. Schedules can be created either for Field Tickets or for Rental Tickets of type Service. The scheduling mechanism is flexible enough to let the dispatcher define the exact pattern needed for the ticket generation reoccurrence – for example: set a daily, weekly, monthly, on a specific day(s) of the week or month and so on…

There is much more that can be said when talking about how riger^® handles dispatching operations, and a few paragraphs of text are just simply not enough. Contact us, schedule a demo, and let us show you how riger^® can help boost your dispatching (and not only…).