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.
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).
