Automation Helps Field Compression Firm Manage Assets Spread From Texas To Alaska

A manufacturer and provider of production field enhancement compressors that are working at sites spread from onshore and offshore Texas to Alaska has achieved significant gains in efficiency since it implemented an integrated solution from Skymira that delivers remote work order automation, real-time inventory management, equipment monitoring and GPS positioning.

Compressco manufactures production enhancement solutions for marginal and low pressure oil and gas wells. The firm manufactures, leases and services its GasJack™ mobile compressor technology designed to increase production and total recoverable reserves of natural oil and gas wells.

Most of the placements are in extremely remote areas, including offshore locations, from Texas up through Alaska. Compressco’s business model is one of leasing and servicing the units. The company deploys a team of technicians on a regular basis to service the units and to make repairs when required. Customer contracts typically include an uptime guarantee.
At the time the Skymira solutions were implemented, Compressco had several thousand units in operation and over 160 full time technicians servicing them.

Compressco Challenges That Needed To Be Overcome

• Manual work orders were creating extensive paperwork bottlenecks.
• Parts inventory management was manually managed.
• Remote machinery could go down without anyone knowing right away.
• Reasons for machine failure could not be established until technicians arrived.
• Verification of machine location was based on paper records.
• Without a centralized database, mining all of the valuable data that was coming out of the field was difficult.

Challenges
Compressco realized early on that manual processes for creating work orders, managing parts inventory and identifying machines requiring maintenance were significantly impeding their ability to grow as quickly as they required. The challenges identified as having the greatest near-term impact included:

Work orders were all paper-based. Service records were handwritten and mailed back to the main office for manual data entry. With over 4,000 work orders each month, the amount of paperwork was extreme, taking three full time clerks and an entire conference room to handle it.
Parts inventory on the technicians’ trucks was also manually managed. The inefficiencies of this process were believed to be resulting in higher costs for the company, but there was no way to effectively analyze the data to know where savings could be generated.

GasJacks™ could go down in remote areas and the company would not be aware of the situation unless called by the people on-site, or until it was discovered by a technician on a routine maintenance call. The downtime resulted in lost customer productivity and charge-backs.

The specific reason for a machine’s failure was not known until the technician arrived on site. There was no way to assure the proper parts were on the technician’s truck, nor whether the technician’s skill set best matched the nature of the repair.

Compressco’s method of verifying the exact location of their units was paper based records of last known location. They needed real-time GPS tracking to assure maximum use of resources.