Every company can hit a point where their traditional methods clash with growth. What is to be done at that point?
Systems that felt reliable and predictable now begin to become fragmented or unclear. But this is not a cause of the system itself failing. The company has just outgrown it. In oilfield services, field ticketing operations often keep working with outdated workflows right up to the point when they start interfering with performance.
Field tickets are the backbone of basically each job in your operations, serving to capture work completed, resources used, time on-site, and even your critical client approvals to follow through on work orders. Yet with innovations in modern technologies, companies are still using paperwork to document this information, believing that what’s familiar may also be the best. The method you choose, paper or digital, will have a stunning impact on your operational accuracy, speed, cash flows, and most importantly field efficiency.
So, what’s better for you: traditional oilfield paper tickets, or digital field tickets powered by software?
Let’s take a deeper look.
Accuracy and Data Integrity
Paper tickets allow for free-form input, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Great for flexibility, but not so much for consistency in ticketing. So many factors come into play with this free-form input, considering different types of handwriting, field getting skipped over, and even numbers getting smudged from operators’ hands. Even the smallest mistakes, like a wrong service code, can get management in great trouble, all while delaying billing. What’s even worse, is that when these mistakes are submitted on paper, there may not be a clear trail to verify how or when they occurred.
With
field ticket software
,
all required fields can be standardized and even auto filled depending on the user. Drop-down menus can significantly reduce variability, and fields won’t be submitted incomplete anymore. The result is a cleaner, consistent flow of data that downstream systems like invoicing can directly rely on.
Speed and Workflow Efficiency
Filling out a paper oilfield ticket may not seem like a slow process until you factor in the delays. Time spent driving back to the office, locating the right person to review and approve, manually entering the data into a digital system. It all adds up. What should take hours of your day, ends up taking days or even weeks to wrap up, from job completion to invoicing.
With digital field tickets, everything moves faster. Technicians can complete and submit tickets directly from their remote locations, managers approve them from the office, and this data flows instantly into office systems to begin processing. Reductions in delays caused directly by digitalized methods will show results of faster invoicing, and happier clients, who get their results faster than ever before.
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Scalability and Growth
Paper systems may work fine for small teams or localized operations. As service lines continue to grow, and job sites spread throughout the country, paper becomes incredibly hard to manage on that large of a scale. The sheer volume of tickets that can come in every week can become chaotic, with different departments having to catch up to others in an unstable rhythm.
Field ticket software is developed to scale with its business. Whether you choose to manage five crews, or one hundred of them, tickets are all centralized and searchable in this one digital platform. There would be no need to search through filing cabinets for hours or wait for much needed paperwork to physically arrive to your office. These digital systems also allow you to utilize analytics on top of your operational data, giving large-scale insights to leadership on trends and performance over time.
Accountability and Compliance
Lost documents, missing signatures, you name it. These common pain points in paper-based systems can be a whole ordeal to track. When an audit rolls around and your own client requests a job verification, tracking down the original ticket can be quite a hassle. Nowadays, there is rarely a clear audit trail with paper tickets.
Each digital ticket is automatically time-stamped, tagged, and stored in the cloud, or in your internal systems for future use. At any time, you can figure out who approved it, who filled it out, and when exactly each of these actions occurred. Built-in audit trails make it so much easier for compliance control, and help to develop accountability in the company’s culture, among field staff, administration, and supervisors.
The Hidden Cost of Paper
Sticking with paper may seem cheaper in the short term. There are no software licenses to acquire, no staff training measures or devices to purchase. But considering the hidden costs covered above, like delays in billing, lost revenue, and your company’s integrity, it may be a better option to invest in your company’s long-term ROI by working on removing inefficient operations and getting stronger insights from the field.
As well, going green is always an important step for oil and gas companies to take. Creating less waste products by going digital can significantly enhance the ways in which clients can see your business and directly influence your market presence.
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What to Consider When Making the Switch
If you’re thinking about moving from paper to digital field ticketing, you can start by asking a few questions.
- Where are my current bottlenecks?
- How often are these paper tickets lost, late, or incomplete?
- What would faster invoicing cycles mean for my cashflow? For my business growth?
- Are my teams ready for the change? Will it require corporate buy-in?
It is vital that businesses choose a system that matches operational needs and recognize that field ticketing is not only a documentation task, but also a strategic part of your business.
Paper tickets have served their purpose, by building many businesses from the ground up, and setting a solid foundation for the future. But with modern standards for oilfield service companies in the oil and gas sector, this same paper is becoming more of a liability than an asset to your success.
The question wasn’t whether to move away from paper, but rather if your company is ready to operate without the constraints of paper ticketing. The better system doesn’t have to be the one you have used for longer. Maybe it’s the one that finally lets you do more.
