Improving Efficiency and Cost Savings in the Oil and Gas Industry with Smart Scheduling

In the United States alone, the oil and gas industry employs more than a million people, with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment. A significant majority of those workers are mobile and field workers, and there is a lot riding on getting the right workers and the right equipment to the right place at the right time.

Manually tracking and assigning that many mobile workers and that much equipment is extremely time-consuming, inefficient, and cost-heavy. Poorly planned schedules that have field workers driving back and forth to different assignments leads to increased emissions and environmental costs, and missed maintenance tasks can cause enormous safety risks and service downtime.

That’s why many oil and gas companies are turning to smart cloud-based scheduling platforms to automate and optimize worker and equipment tracking and assignments, resulting in cost savings, improved productivity, and powerful enterprise-wide scheduling visibility. 

Thanks to these improvements, customers in the oil and gas industry report an average ROI of 9x after adopting an effective smart scheduling platform.

Asset Utilization

In the field, there are a wide array of expensive, mission-critical pieces of machinery to manage. From trucks to flare stacks, they’re expensive to purchase, expensive to maintain, and expensive to operate.  When they’re on the job, they’re extremely profitable. But for every minute they spend sitting idle, collecting dust, they’re just wasting money. 

An intelligent asset management platform makes it easy to reduce that idle time and increase asset utilization up to 20% by providing visibility into where your assets are, where they’re needed, and who is available to move and operate them in order to help you get the most possible bang for buck out of every piece of equipment. 

A robust asset management platform also makes it simple to track use and maintenance schedules all in one place to make sure that your machinery is kept in good working order from one system of record. 

That means less time spent sitting idle in a field, less time in the repair shop, and more time in profitable operation.

Trip Optimization

Just like all that expensive equipment, when field workers are at job sites performing critical work, they’re creating value. “Windshield time,” however — time spent sitting behind the wheel getting to where they’re needed — is not.  Inefficient scheduling increases windshield time along with emissions, safety risks and costs.  

A smart cloud-based scheduling platform can dramatically reduce windshield time by making it easy to optimize how you schedule and dispatch field workers to job sites. 

A field worker that’s already in west Texas on one job is a better candidate for a nearby job site than a technician currently located near Houston. A good workforce management solution automatically ranks, prioritizes, and suggests workers who are already nearby. A great solution notifies schedulers that a well at that job site is scheduled for maintenance next week, so that task can be completed while the technician is already there, further slashing windshield time.

The right platform can also recommend the best order of job completion to maximize route efficiency, improve response times, and prevent workers from driving back and forth to complete their assignments (improving safety). 

This kind of route optimization reduces costs, both in employee hours and in transportation expenses like fuel and maintenance. 

Skills Matching

There are a multitude of different kinds of workers within the oil and gas industry, all of whom have varied skills and certifications. Keeping track of all that can make manual scheduling a nightmare. The industry is also facing a rising skills shortage, making it even more critical to effectively assign the skilled workers your company already has.

With attribute tagging, a smart scheduling platform makes it simple to filter for workers with the needed skills and certifications, or automatically assign qualified workers to jobs.

A robust workforce management solution with skills matching functionality combined with geographic route optimization can reduce scheduling time by nearly 50%, making it quick and easy to get the right workers to the right jobs.

Rapid Response

When things go wrong in the field, immediate response is critical. If a pipeline bursts, no one has time to scroll through a long list of hundreds of possible responders to check that they have the right skills to address the situation. 

In rapid response situations, an intelligent scheduling platform can save time by automatically identifying the right worker and assigning them to emergency jobs based on skills and attribute tagging. This significantly improves response time and reduces service downtime, improving customer satisfaction by up to 68%.

A smart asset management platform isn’t only useful after a disaster has already occurred. The right solution can also automate and improve scheduling for maintenance of critical systems and equipment to help prevent emergency events from happening in the first place, so nothing ever slips through the cracks or gets overlooked.

Closeout + Documentation

Once a job assignment is completed, a cloud-based workforce management platform with a robust mobile app makes it fast and simple for field workers to document their work right on their phone and save it to one easily searchable, auditable source of record.

With a convenient mobile application,  there’s no need for mobile workers to remember to log their reports hours or days later when they’re back in front of a computer.

In the home office, this results in less time wasted on manual back-and-forth to check that assigned tasks are completed. A good workforce management system also turns this documentation into a reliable and easy-to-search paper trail, improving reporting efficiency and reducing compliance costs and risks.

The right cloud-based workforce management system can provide streamlined and simplified scheduling, route optimization, improved asset management, and more to improve operations for oil and gas companies with large mobile workforces.

The best part? You’ve already found the right solution. Skedulo is a recognized leader in the field service industry, helping their customers achieve an average ROI of 9x. 

Skedulo also makes it easy to integrate their scheduling solution with your existing enterprise resource planning software, making it quick and simple to implement. Skedulo even has an official partnership with SAP.

To learn more about how Skedulo’s workforce management system can save your enterprise time and money, request a demo.