Mobile technology hits the oil patch

I'm a bit late updating some of the recent work I've done. Below is a technology story I wrote for TQ magazine, which is published by The Globe And Mail. It's also online at their site here.

Bonanza in the oil patch

A Calgary company hits pay dirt with a wireless ticketing system for its workers in the field
CRAIG SILVERMAN
April 11, 2007

Tucker Wireline Services Canada; Calgary
Business An oil services company that provides oil well logging and perforation services to energy companies
Employees 200
Project
Equipping its field workers with mobile technology to eliminate an
error-prone and costly paper-based system for data capture, pricing and
invoicing
Initial cost $1 million—about $7,000 to $10,000 to
equip each team with a notebook computer, network access and
electronic-signature capture pad
Ongoing costs Network access for transmitting data from the field
ROI Close to $500,000 a year in savings thanks to improved billing and invoicing, and increased productivity

Dave Jellett was talking to a field engineer at Tucker Wireline
Services Canada a few months ago when he realized just how successful
the company's new wireless field-ticketing service has been. Jellett,
Tucker's president and chief operating officer, listened as the
engineer bemoaned the recent theft of his laptop. "He was crying the
blues because he'd lost the system and was back to paper," says Jellett.

Without his laptop, the engineer would have to go back to the
way things were done before the company began rolling out its new
remote workstations about a year ago. Roughly 75 of Tucker's 200
Canadian employees work in oil fields across Alberta, providing
services to such companies as EnCana and Suncor. Tucker lowers sensors
into newly drilled wells to take readings from the rock that help
decide how the oil company should proceed. "It's like doing an MRI for
the rock," says Jellett.

Tucker also provides "perforation" services—drilling holes
into the steel casing placed inside a well to enable it to start
producing oil. Tucker's field teams are constantly on the move,
gathering new data from different wells and performing whatever work
the oil companies need. At each stop, the team fills out a so-called
field ticket that includes all the key information about the job, along
with the cost of the services performed.

In the old paper-based system, each team had to fill out
several pages of forms and produce an invoice using a large pricing
book they had to lug from site to site. "They usually filled out the
paperwork on the fly, and it certainly added a couple of hours to every
job," says Jellett. That's big money: Each lost crew hour costs Tucker
$500.

Allowing
workers like Jack Domet to complete their paperwork in the field saves
Tucker Wireline roughly two hours per job or about $1,000.
The paperwork was then delivered by hand or sent via bus to
one of Tucker's field offices, in Medicine Hat, Leduc or Grand Prairie.
From there, it would make its way by car or bus to the Calgary
headquarters. "One of the big problems we had was the two to three
weeks' time it took to get the information into the office," says
Jellett. "That also meant delays in terms of invoicing customers and
getting paid, and getting the data associated with our operations into
the office."

Another hassle: engineers would often make mistakes while
filling out forms in the field. "Any time you're doing paper records,
the error rate associated with it is very high," says Jellett. "We
would have everything from pricing errors right though to
data-recording errors."

Tucker knew that field tickets wasted time, degraded the
quality of data and delayed the time between doing a job and getting
paid for it. So three years ago, the company partnered with Spira Data
Corp., a Calgary-based oil-field technology company, to turn its paper
forms into software. As for transmitting data directly from the field,
that fell to Telus. (The telco now sells the new system, dubbed
wireless field ticketing, to other oil services companies.)

Tucker's system works like this: Each three-person field team
(the company has 25 of them) gets a basic laptop loaded with the
ticketing software and a network card so it can connect to Telus's
high-speed wireless network (in remote areas where cell coverage is
unavailable, they can connect via satellite).

When they arrive at a well and assess what they need to do,
the team fills out an electronic field ticket; the software
automatically calculates how much the job will cost, thus reducing math
errors, and generates an invoice that's signed by the customer on site,
using a signature capture pad that plugs into the laptop. Then the team
sends all the data and invoices over the cell network back to the head
office, where it's processed.

Tucker spent about $1 million to get the system up and
running (all its field teams were wireless by August, 2006), and
Jellett says the company will save close to half a million dollars a
year, two-thirds thanks to the faster billing process, the rest from
increased employee productivity. "We felt we would pay for the whole
development of the system within the first two years of usage," says
Jellett, noting the company is on track to meet that goal.

There are other, less tangible savings. Jellett says his field teams are now able to better analyze the data.

"It allows them to focus on issues other than data entry," he
says. "Now they're actually looking at the data and trends of activity,
and analyzing and making decisions based upon the data."

Telus's projections for the system show an average reduction
of four weeks' invoicing time for clients, "a significant advantage
when you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars earned each
day," says

Telus's Allison Vale. "The default business case on the ROI
calculator for the wireless field ticketing solution comes up with a
return of $1.8 million over five years" in cost savings and faster
invoicing.

"Everything is captured within that notebook instead of in a
huge briefcase," says Jellett. "The field teams find it easier to use,
and the buy-in has been terrific. We had to do some work on the
education side with a few customers because they're stuck in the old
way of doing things.

But it's a better system for them as well because it makes
for less paper and material for them to handle." Still, he admits some
customers prefer having the old few weeks' delay before seeing an
invoice from Tucker.

"I'd be lying to you if I said that wasn't the case," Jellett says, laughing.

April 23, 2007 | Filed Under Feature articles, Magazine articles, The Globe And Mail 

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