How to make the most of your apps

How do I use all this data?

Access to good data is only useful if you can analyse it. Therefore, it’s imperative that you look for a solutions provider with superb analytics capabilities. Analytics enables your management team to monitor the performance of personnel and equipment automatically.

They should be able to use the software to quickly analyse and track personnel performance by division, region, depot or individual and equipment utilisation by region, depot or project. This ability to track every task, every piece of equipment and every employee, gives you far greater control of your operations – and a complete handle on day to day costs.

Will paperless operations give me a competitive edge?

Going paperless helps oilfield service companies differentiate themselves and gain a competitive edge. Several opportunities arise from switching to paper-free operations.

The first is that, for ambitious growth companies, going paperless enables them to grow faster through consistent, repeatable and scalable working practices. It is far easier to replicate and scale the success of digitised operations than paper-based processes. This gives you electronic auditability – think of the output of these apps as a ‘black box flight recorder’ of your operations.

Secondly, your health and safety compliance is far more robust, ensuring safer working practices. These practices are also supported by that black box of data, which can be easily interrogated to provide clear accountability.

Thirdly, better-informed customers are happier customers. No business gets everything right for every customer; there will always be challenges and issues. Having all information at your fingertips means you can improve customer communications, while ensuring that you resolve issues as early as possible.

Improvements in efficiency, accountability and customer service play a huge role in building your brand as a trusted and reliable service company that delivers on its promises. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, you can exploit this hard-won reputation as a value-added service. Your differentiator enables you to become a service company judged on quality and trust – not only on price.

An often-overlooked competitive edge is future-proofing your business. Leading-edge providers, such as Spartan, with the PHALANX solution, are always developing new and smarter ways of working. In the near future, we will see new artificial intelligence software helping service companies extend the useful working life of critical equipment in their customers operation.

Such apps will take data from sensors on the machinery and combine it with the digital service history and hours of service information. This data will be channelled through self-learning software algorithms that grow increasingly smarter – the more data you feed them, the better the machine learning becomes and the easier it gets to optimise your fleet.

Such quantum leaps in technology are major opportunities for organisations that are ready to take advantage. Those oilfield service companies already digitally-engaged and prepared for the transition will be the biggest beneficiaries when it happens.

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