Extreme weather, cyber attacks, volatile supply chains, trade disputes, war: Oil and gas fleets face pressures from all sides. Accenture reports that 82% of oil and gas fleets are experiencing moderate to severe supply chain disruptions, which can add $10 to $15 per barrel to the breakeven cost of a new well.
That’s why oil and gas fleets need to do everything they can to insulate themselves from disruptions and volatile energy prices.
While you can’t control the weather or the geopolitical landscape, you can take steps to reduce your fleet’s downtime, and thus increase overall productivity.
Many oil and gas fleets operate across giant geographical ranges, so it’s hard to know exactly how well your fleet is performing. If something breaks on a remote site hundreds of miles from headquarters, it could take days to bring equipment back online. And if an essential part is stuck in supply chain limbo, it could be weeks.
All that downtime adds up to lost productivity that hurts your bottom line.
However, a fleet management solution gives you insights that can help you reduce downtime so you can increase productivity.
Motive’s fleet management solution can help you:
- Gain visibility into your equipment, assets, and utilization trends.
- Shift to predictive maintenance.
- Improve asset utilization.
Gain visibility across your entire oil and gas fleet
Do you know where all your equipment and assets currently are? Which are idle, and which are active? Which are on schedule, and which might be running late?
Motive’s GPS and geofencing give you real-time insights into the current location of your drivers, assets, and equipment. With that information, you can track oil and gas fleet arrivals and departures. You can even set up geofences that alert you when equipment enters or exits a site, so you can proactively notify your customers with an accurate expected arrival time. That simple heads-up can ensure that the site or contractor is ready, minimizing your own driver’s wait time.
Mike Meeker, Fleet Manager and Environmental Health and Safety Specialist at Architectural Surfaces, says, “With the Motive all-in-one platform, Architectural Surfaces houses compliance, safety, maintenance, and fuel spend information in one place, giving us a 360-degree view of fleet operations and a holistic understanding of safety performance.”
Beyond helping your own operations, you can also share this visibility with your customers or other teams on a worksite.
Tim Summach at Prairie Disposal adds, “Unlike other fleet management technology providers, Motive enables us to manage our whole fleet on a single platform. Now we can see all our operations in one place, whether it’s compliance or safety, maintenance or asset tracking. Having 360-degree visibility into our operations saves us time and improves productivity.”
Read: How AI can improve oil and gas fleet sustainability.
Shift to predictive maintenance
Reacting to sudden breakdowns in your oil and gas fleet is disruptive and expensive. Your driver and equipment may wind up stranded, waiting for assistance while your delivery grows later and your customer gets frustrated. You might even face penalties.
Unplanned maintenance is expensive, as you’re at the mercy of a local shop rather than your own facility. Plus, with today’s supply chain issues, you may be out of luck while you wait for essential parts. The costs of unplanned maintenance grew by 3% in 2021, and between technician shortages and inflation, they’re likely growing even faster today..
While traditional maintenance schedules are based on elapsed time, Motive can help you shift to predictive maintenance based on your vehicle’s actual condition and usage. Predictive maintenance combines sensor data about vibrations, temperature, pressure, and noise to detect early warning signs of malfunction. Motive can alert you to diagnostic fault codes as they occur, so you can act quickly before the problem escalates.
Motive also gives your fleet managers detailed vehicle utilization reports that can identify irregular fuel consumption or other anomalies that may warn of looming issues.
Overall, shifting to preventive maintenance helps fleets reduce maintenance-related downtime by about 20%.
Improve oil and gas asset utilization
Knowing where your assets are can improve overall utilization by reducing detention times and improving efficiency.
Motive Fleet View gives your dispatchers real-time location tracking that can help them find the nearest driver, share documents, and message drivers. Together, this speeds up just-in-time deliveries while helping to provide an accurate ETA to the worksite supervisor or customer. With everything in the Motive app, your driver and the site are ready. Dispatchers can even see a driver’s HOS status right in the Motive Driver App, so they won’t dispatch a driver who is approaching their limit.
Expressway Logistics uses Motive’s Vehicle Gateway, Fleet App, and Compliance Hub to give its safety and dispatch teams a live view of every truck and driver on the road. After switching from a more complicated system, Expressway now spends 50% less time managing compliance, freeing up time to support dispatch with real-time decisions about which drivers and assets to deploy on each load.
Ellen McDonald, Safety Director at Expressway Logistics, explains, “Motive just makes compliance easier. It’s one click to get to the Compliance Hub, and I’m there. It shows me which drivers I need to worry about, which drivers have more violations, and which drivers have less. It’s all there, and it saves me a lot of time. I’m not digging around and hunting down that kind of stuff anymore.”
Detention time can cost up to $1,280 per driver per year. Extended detention periods can also have a negative impact on safety.
STEP Energy Services, a Canada-based oilfield services provider, uses Motive Asset Gateways to keep constant tabs on high-value equipment spread across dozens of remote customer locations. Before Motive, they relied on word of mouth to track where units were, which led to confusion and lost productivity. Now, they can see exactly where each asset is, route the nearest replacement when something breaks in the field, and keep jobs on schedule.
“When we know where our equipment is, we can utilize it better, keep it working for clients and we can move quickly to serve their needs,” says Jayme Borgstrom, DOT Manager at STEP Energy Services.
See how your oil and gas fleet can benefit from Motive
Want to learn how Motive can help cut your oil and gas fleet’s downtime and improve productivity? Request a demo to get started.
