Staying Connected Even While Disconnected

The Client

An oil and gas company with over 5,000 remote drilling sites.

The Problem

Mechanics travel to and from multiple drilling sites throughout the day to complete work orders and perform maintenance on pumping equipment. The mechanics are equipped with cellular-capable laptops and software to download their work orders, and enter the labor and parts used.

However, the software solution did not perform well in remote areas where there is little to no cell coverage.

When the solution was initially implemented about a year ago, there were no major performance issues. But as time passed, work continued to grow, and things began to slow down. Often times, the mechanics would have to wait up 10 to 15 minutes to download their data, only to have the download fail due to poor cellular coverage.

A solution was needed to reduce the download time, reduce failed downloads and provide insight to the user about the timestamp of the last synchronization.

The Solution

Smartbridge conducted an assessment of the software, and did a comprehensive breakdown of the data download process. Detailed analysis of the time taken on each data element was performed. The insights from this analysis were reviewed with business and operations teams to help identify the data sets that are prime candidates for optimization.

The deep dive analysis identified two main issues:

1. several data sets were downloaded without proper time limits set, and
2. several other data sets were downloaded that were not needed by all mechanic groups.

Modifications were made to ensure that users downloaded only the necessary data both in terms of the data sets and the time bounds on the data sets. In order to monitor performance in the future, additional logic was implemented to record download statistics so that a report could be generated showing the user and download duration.

The Result

Using the solution implemented by Smartbridge, the mechanics saw their download times improve drastically. The average download time before and after this solution went from 7-8 minutes to under 2 minutes. The performance enhancements resulted in operational efficiencies for the mechanics and a better user experience.